Obama ballin'

Instead of shirts and skins, it was "That One" vs. "This One":

Oh, PLEASE nominate the hillbilly diva in 2012 (and more bloggerhea)

That would be perfect.

I think what we're seeing here on our media today is someone who really, really wants to be your nominee, and is trying to keep her profile high for the next four years. Truly hilarious and pathetic at the same time. I just have to hope that the GOP will fall for the ruse.

-- Try to pace yourselves, player haters. It's going to be a long eight years. Trust me on this.

-- Who, or what, is killing the blogopshere?

Blogging seems to have entered its midlife crisis, with much existential gnashing-of-teeth about the state and fate of a literary form that once seemed new and fresh and now seems familiar and tired. And there's good reason for the teeth-gnashing. While there continue to be many blogs, including a lot of very good ones, it seems to me that one would be hard pressed to make the case that there's still a "blogosphere." That vast, free-wheeling, and surprisingly intimate forum where individual writers shared their observations, thoughts, and arguments outside the bounds of the traditional media is gone. Almost all of the popular blogs today are commercial ventures with teams of writers, aggressive ad-sales operations, bloated sites, and strategies of self-linking. Some are good, some are boring, but to argue that they're part of a "blogosphere" that is distinguishable from the "mainstream media" seems more and more like an act of nostalgia, if not self-delusion.

That paragraph opens Nicolas Carr's somewhat disconcerting opinion that a "corporate shakeout" of sorts is coming ... or perhaps has already arrived.

Bart seems a little bitter:

Kos the multi-gazillionaire makes so much money he's killing all of us. When people go to advertise on the web, most of that money goes to Kos.

He's the Wal-Mart of the Internet, killing the mom and pop bloggers.

Even Hillary stupidly spent her money there - nobody hates her more than Kos.

I don't know if this is a big deal or not -- or if it's any deal at all. Markos has certainly gotten awfully rich from blogging, something that is conspicuously not happening to anybody else. There is some stratification occurring but that might be just plain old capitalism and a maturing blogging "industry". The big boys like Kos and the second tier are certainly separating from the riff-raff (like me) through the self-linking strategy described in the link, but again that may just be part of the maturation cycle. I -- and most of the rest of us blogging in our parents' basement in our Cheeto-stained underwear -- don't do this for the money, after all. It'd be nice, but it's probably not going to happen at this point. And there are few new bloggers popping up as well (maybe that's not a bad thing either). But it used to be said that if you wrote well and often that people would find you.

I don't think that is altogether true any longer. What do you think?

Veterans Day 2008