Pen-Elayne on the Web

Leaping Liberals

I wasn't going to blog about this, as it's all rather inside and meta-bloggish and I know blogosphere self-proctology can get pretty boring, but what the hell. My fever's still raging and they're still making noise upstairs and I don't seem to have the head for anything more substantial anyway.

So, once upon a time there was this website called The Truth Laid Bear, whose purpose is to chart the popularity of various blogs by reading their Site Meter statistics of incoming links and site visits and all that, as well as to showcase new blog entries of note. And then there started to be alliances among like-minded bloggers for, I guess, the purpose of mutual support and coalition building and friendship and upping site stats and all that.

Now, I'll digress by saying that this is where things start to get fuzzy for me. I have three site counters on my sidebar - the aforementioned Site Meter, plus OneStat plus eXTReMe Tracking, and I'm afraid I can't make heads or tails out of most of their info. I check them now and again to see who's visiting the site, whether there are any frequent guests whose blogs I should add, things like that. But mostly they're pretty and decorative blog-related buttons, the same as all the ones above them. I just don't have it in me to obsess over statistics. When I started Pen-Elayne on the Web, I guess my goal was to eventually have about as many daily readers as the number of INSIDE JOKE subscribers I had in the '80s. And I've done that; I used to print 200 copies of IJ every six weeks, which meant right around 175 readers or so, and that's about the daily average for this blog - although TTLB has me at 249 at present, probably a result of recent skewing due to my Mid-Ohio Con report and news about Alan Davis. I'll never have the concentrated, explosive readership that an all-one-subject blog will get, and that's okay, because my life isn't all one subject and I'm not much for being pigeonholed anyway. So I'm pretty amazed that I've even gotten to the range of Large Mammal in TTLB's Ecosystem, and yeah, there's a part of me that looks at some of the Playful Primates and Mortal Humans and says "Wouldn't that be cool to be in the Top 100 of something?" but I don't really lose sleep over it.

So anyway, during the time I was away in Ohio, there was a TLB flap involving the League of Liberals, a left-leaning blogger alliance of which I've been a member. TTLB's front page has the unfolding story, here then here and finally here. Now, I don't pretend to understand half this techie stuff, but what it seems to amount to is that LoL leader Barry Bozeman was running four different weblogs under four different pseudonyms and putting up multiple Site Meters on each of them, or something like that. The idea of multiple weblogs astounds me in the first place, I can hardly keep up with one, so already this practice lost me. I think it might have something to do with what I said above, the more specifically-focused your weblog is the likelier it is to get visits from people zeroed in only on that subject. But I must admit I felt kinda duped finding out that Barry is actually also Savage Cruel Bigot and Annthrax Coultergeist and especially Hal Burton Cheney, because Hell for Halliburton was one of those blogs up for a New Blog Showcase vote back when the LoL was just picking up steam, and it doesn't seem fair for an apparently veteran blogger to start a new blog and then nominate himself for the Showcase. A lot of what was going on suddenly seemed like cheating.

And the LoL mailing list erupted as well. I came back on Monday to almost 200 posts, which took me until Wednesday to even get through. The way things shook out was that a few folks left and N. Todd Pritsky has now set up the Liberal Coalition as another bloc. Me, I've been fence-sitting, mostly because I didn't even know about the Coalition until just this morning. (Told you I was behind in my blogroll reading!) NZ Bear says he'd prefer a minimum membership (looks like it'll be 20) in order for the new group to be eligible to sponsor the Showcase competition, and as of this morning their membership was still in the single-digits. They have a suggestion for their first vote, which was actually my recommendation to the LoL list on Wednesday but to which nobody there has yet responded. I wrote, "My suggestion for this week's LoL vote is Mustang Bobby's 'Bark Bark Woof Woof' site, specifically his comparison of Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore with Sir Thomas More in a post entitled, More On Moore, Who Is No More. It's a couple weeks outdated but I found it a fanciful and original idea." So I've now registered my vote, although on behalf of which coalition will depend, I suspect, on a lot of that techie stuff I don't quite grasp.

Todd tells me via e-mail, "TTLB only allows membership in one alliance, so you would have to choose allegiance in that regard." I hate choices like this. As I say I feel a bit duped by Barry, but he seems like a nice guy anyway. And I like Todd a lot too, and like he says, "We recognize that the TTLB ranking system is just a game, but all games have rules, and circumventing, bending or abusing those rules makes the game no fun for anybody." So as I do need to make a choice, and as I tend to lean towards propriety in cases like this, I've decided to drop my official membership in LoL and go over to LC. However, both blogs will remain on my blogroll under "Da Groups."

Update: As they say, the thick plottens. Here's Barry's latest post on LoL, announcing his hiatus from blogging (I've removed him from the blogroll) for personal reasons, as well as containing more accusations (this time against N. Todd) having to do with the number games around which I can't wrap my brain, but which reads to me like little more than sour grapes. I'm beginning to think sngrfxz's observation in the comment section below is spot-on... Meanwhile, Tom Burka has his own unique take on the situation.