Nobody cares but me, I suppose, but because of Tim Blair I've been thinking about why I'm doing this. Way back when, I just trolled around the web and other people's blogs looking for things that I found interesting. As I found each one, I'd email them to my short list of victims (in fact, that's what I called the mailing list: "victims"). Eventually, Lee decided that I should stop emailing the links around and started this blog. The first two of three things I posted were pretty much just what I would have emailed out: a link with maybe one sentence worth of context. In an email to my wife, this is okay; on a publicly-available blog, not so much so.

My current theory ties in with the rather common "thinkers" v. "linkers" dichotomy, although I dispute the implication that I'm not thinking when I choose to spend my credibility (such as it is) in recommending someone else's writing. I posit instead that everybody is a newspaperman. Some people, Steven Den Beste, Eric S. Raymond, Bill Whittle, Jane Galt, et al, write their articles to suit themselves. They have some position on some topic, and write about it to whatever extent they find necessary. In short, they're journalists. Other people, like me, don't write the newspaper but we do select from the set of articles to accumulate a periodic digest of interesting bits of writing plus the occasional op-ed. In short, we're publishers.

You might imagine that being a gatekeeper is an easy job, and I'll certainly agree that it doesn't involve as much typing as authoring the content in the first place. The downside is that Jane Galt writes two or three posts a day; on an average day, I read every posting on every blog on my blogroll since the last time I read it (which was probably yesterday). I'll try to remember to count today how many things I'll read through to find the two/three/six/ten things that I think are important/relevant/amusing enough and in the right vein to make people like me go "Cool/Huh/#$@@#^", but I suspect it's over 200 articles a day. It's different work than writing the articles, but it isn't falling off a log either.

Anyway, I'll try to be worthy of Tim's praise going forward. Thanks for listening.

UPDATE: 205 articles before starting the commercial news outlets, and it's a slow news day in that lots of bloggers had no updates at all. That's me ... selflessly slaving away reading all this stuff so you don't have to. Unless you want to, in which case you can follow the links I've provided over there <--- on the left side of the screen.