PSoTD

They call it the naked wine show, but it's really much more about wine than about naked.

750 Volts is closing their door, on to a new blog, the New Dominion Project. I'm not sure what that's going to do to the sites on 750 Volts' blogroll, but here's one more promotion of those blogs here.

13th Floor — 7-West — Ambivalent Mumblings — Anonymous Is A Woman — Bearing Drift — Bob Gibson — Bob Gibson — Brian Patton — Daily Whackjob — Donncha — Dougal — Fairfax County Democrats — In The Belly Of The Beast — Johnny Camacho — Kookinelli — Liberal Rage ™ — Mark Levine’s Inside Scoop — Mosquito Blog — Not Larry Sabato — One Man’s Trash — Ox Road South — Power Concedes — Raising Kaine — Renaissance Ruminations — Richmond Democrat — Richmond War Room — Rick Howell Speaks — Rick Sincere — Shrieks From the Booby Hatch — SLANTblog — South of the James — The Daily WhackJob — The Thicket — Too Conservative — Verns Blog — Virginia Progressive — Vivian Page — Waldo Jaquith

Central PA, you should bookmark Wisdom for Winos, promising with just a hint of walnut.

Sara Bozich has a good list of local Harrisburg area bloggers.

And speaking of Capitol area bloggers and tweeters, there's a tweetup in Harrisburg on December 18th - anyone here going? I haven't been to one before, but thinking about going to one.

PSoTD really isn't such a blog. If they had an awards category for "Most Clearly Fading Blogger" then I might be able to clear some award mantle space...

John Cole shares it too.

Has to be FiveThirtyEight.com. I'm not sure if it was perfect timing or luck, but bloggers and the media needed this site to put each individual poll's value into perspective on both a state and national level in a way that was accessible by most. This site did that.

less affluent

This site attracts a less affluent audience.

For me, personally, the most discouraging blog on the Internet, from the quality of the main posts to the brain power of those who leave comments, has to be this one. It's almost impossible to read through the density of anger and hate that permeates it.

I've been drifting away from politics as a specific blog focus, mostly because I've reached a saturation point of how deep into it I want to look. There's only so many things in politics you can be surprised or impressed or disgusted by before you become jaded, and who wants to walk around their entire life being jaded? Too many people play politics and governing as a game, and it's not really a game, nor is it something I want to play as a game, and so I have been turning off of the topic.

I'll be taking this blog into different directions after election day - which directions I can't say for certain, but a more open topic space of things that interest me - and although I may post about politics from time to time, that will no longer be the focus by design. I'll keep the acronym, because its meaning over time has become lost to most and so it could be anything I want at this point, including Philadelphia Seventy-Sixers On Tomato Diet, and few would be the wiser. And the old posts will stay - but that is it.

Most bloggers should have some sort of external measure that helps them finalize such a decision, and mine is this:

12 comments on 35 posts in the past week.

Hopefully that will improve as I post less about what I find more interesting, and hopefully so will the readers that stumble in. A blog should have more conversation.

Michelle Malkin's gut feelings on the "B Carving" attack story are the same as mine, and to her credit she posts them.

Truth hurts.

I like it. Everybody Laughs at Broder.

Some posts to check out.

We're importing email scam jobs from Nigeria, it appears. More jobs for Americans!

So... bikinis are better for volleyball. Proof!

Scandal at Capital Blue Cross!

John Oliver DID nail Bush's legacy in this clip.

After all the excitement, all the buzz, all the initial enjoyment - the Coliseum files for Chapter 11.

Would you like a wearable motorcycle?

Interesting site, moves fast.

This meme returns:

Gone. I did not know.

I'm not going to do it, but curious what others think of it.

What happened? Where did they go?

This really isn't a post about Duncan Black's blog, just a test of the power of PSoTD in Google PageRank.

And it's jam-packed with information.

Caught when I was skimming Bloglines...

As of January 2008 there were approximately 155,583,825 sites on the internet. That’s roughly 1 for every 42 people on earth. Where's my 42 readers?

I'm going to get around to this meme, but it is labor-intensive, creating your life soundtrack:

Basically, you start at the year of your birth, and pick the best album for each year.

When you're 49, that's a lot of music to consider.

Philosophers' Playground wants to know the best blogs you read that others may not know about.

You never know what kind of crowd you'll draw when you throw the word "nudity" in your post title.

I have found the way to get our kids to quit asking for us to buy them soda. Now I just have to buy some of this.

Interesting post about a study in 2003 that found that "the average pay in large firms was $39,721 while in small firms it was $31,655 or 20% less."

Patti Smith is cool, period.

By others.

You just never know what your neighbors might be doing with the video recorder on.

I wonder if there will be a time when certain continents have considerably greater bee populations than other areas with similar supportive resources, and if so, will we figure out why.

Technology will get us all.

I don't mind a Bible being in my hotel room. I just look at it as something the hotel is providing that is optional for use, kind of like the coffeemaker, half of the stuff in the free soap kit provided, a couple of the drawers in the dresser, etc. I just don't see it as an either/or option for any hotel. And I think it's stupid to toss the Bible in the trash, or remove it, just if you don't believe in God. It's an option for people, just like that phonebook, and just let people decide for themselves whether they'll use the option.

There's apparently 1, and only 1, MILF at Marineland.

Sometimes Tweety says things that are... almost... inspiring, but it happens way too rarely considering how many times he gets an opportunity.

What's the deal with the manholes?

Here's your chance to catch up on some interesting stuff:

"Britain on alert for deadly new knife with exploding tip that freezes victims' organs." It's a legitimate item, clearly not for most people, but what is the alert about?

Have a great moving story? Mad Melancholic Feminista is looking for some.

One Million Served.

Ever see a 96-armed octopus?

Disbarment, obvious, is not enough, but it should come with the territory of those who get Bush pardons.

The termites are immediately back at the lobbyist disclosure provisions on gifts to lawmakers and staff.

Courtesy of Pen-Elayne, here's a fun little application to play around with...

Like I said, I'm in my own little summer world right now, and I didn't even realize that Senator John Warner has reintroduced the idea (not a bill) of reducing the national speed limit. But where's the bill, Senator?

I had not even heard of Taca Airlines.

MoxieGrrl is winding down her blogging. There's a lot of that going on, I feel it too.

It would probably improve the ratings for the Summer Olympics, too.

Pantone doesn't own me!

Like everywhere else, you can go to jail for crack in Flint, Michigan. Not like everywhere else, the crack involved is from having your pants hang too low.

One of the first bloggers to blogroll PSoTD was Melanie at A Bump in the Beltway. She followed my transition to blogging from the original Political Site of the Day, and just added this blog without request.

The past few months I have not been reading other blogs as much as I used to - I think the anguish between the Obama and Clinton camps bothered me so much that I really reduced my blog reading to avoid the finger pointing - and somehow I missed this news earlier this month:

My friend Melanie Mattson died a few weeks ago. One week from today is her birthday and she would have been 54. (I’ll have a piece of cake for you, Mel.)

An original Daily Kos regular, she was the publisher of Just A Bump in the Beltway, one of the first wave of political blogs. She was also one of the founders of the FluWiki, a comprehensive resource for those studying pandemic flu, and a contributor at Effect Measure.

Melanie will definitely be missed by many bloggers, myself included. She made a difference, and it was recognizable online, and there will be others that will continue the efforts she started. But it's a sorrow that Melanie won't be there to pursue it as well. If there's an afterlife with Bloglines, I hope she realizes how many bloggers were touched by her.

One of the sad realities of blogging is that bloggers die. EVERY time it happens a shock occurs to readers, and it ripples through the blogosphere. I wonder, as a blogger, if many bloggers have prepped a "last post" blog entry for use in case they end up, you know, expired.

Sky is Falling. Always Falling! Death is near! Barack Obama caused it!

Yep, PETA's running one.

I'm glad that Mr. Phyrillas is excited that his blog has been number one "position on the BlogNetNews.com ranking of Pennsylvania's Most Influential Political Blogs for four consecutive weeks", but I really don't know the real value of that. This blog is also tracked by BNN, and I guess we're being measured by a "variety of data sets to determine which blogs are most powerfully influencing the direction of the Pennsylvania political blogosphere", but I really don't feel any more influential when PSoTD doesn't make the top 20 as when PSoTD cracks the top ten. Links alone don't indicate influence, as search engines and RSS feeds and visitors that don't read are all part of the story, and besides, just because PSoTD is linked doesn't mean it's about anything of influence. Many of the posts here that actually get links are weird items that are found that others find curious, but that's about as far as it goes.

100,000 unique visitors in 18 months, that's something that can be compared as a metric, and congratulations to Mr. Phyrillas for that.

Anyone know what this is about?

Sometimes when a prominent person dies, they leave a "blog subject" tombstone as a marker.

Some interesting, or funny, posts to share:

If you like Joe Cocker but sometimes can't understand the words, this translation is for you. (h/t to Avedon for pointing it out)

Wow, Bush blamed Clinton for the increase of gas prices in 2000 to $30 a barrel. You know, the good ole days.

Are you having a problem with Firefox 3.0? I'm not, but archy is.

This is a good idea, so I'll snag it too: If you want to be on the PSoTD blogroll, let me know through email or comment.

Yeah, I'm not getting Larry Johnson anymore, either.

Hey Republicans - you are blaspheming the Office with the President with your various organizational seals. Change them immediately.

When candy design goes really, really wrong.