Posted 7:40 PM by Gene

Mr. Melodrama tried starting a fight with Mickey K., but it seems nobody was interested. One wonders if the bloom is finally off the blogging rose. A look at Alexa.com rankings shows the SUPERDUPERMEGAGIGABLOGGERS have mostly seen big audience drops, like the loudmouth Michelle or the Bloggers of the Millennium for instances. Even DailyKos is down, a surprise as we'd have thought he'd be going great gu -- gangbusters (although this may signal that last November's liberal conversion was broad but not deep). We could dismiss all this as statistical legerdemain except that eBay's traffic rank and page views are at or near their lowest in five years, and that could be a symptom of some real problems (not least of which some brazen hackery of late). Then again there was a big dip in 2004, and eBay seems not to have suffered. Still we'd like to believe Web surfers have grown tired of the big-name Johnny-One-Notes, and are actively seeking intellectual respite. We fear they're merely victims of the YouTube and social-networking crazes, but we doubt they've risen as much as the big names have fallen. Perhaps too people are realizing the Web isn't the 100-percent Godsend so many said it would be.

We mention this as G000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000GLE's playing tricks with us again -- pleasant tricks, in this case: we're evidently back in Next Blog, but we aren't excited as our last sojourn there lasted only about three or four months, and then the algorithms pulled the digital plug; we are thoroughly resigned to it happening again. That said the "new" Blogger is a huge step up from the old (except for the permanent error messages when we search within Edit Posts), and were it not for vast clunky server farms we'd be ready to say something nice about the Dalai Lamas of Mountain View. We'll save that, however, pending further blogging.