I am replacing PE with Carpe Diem, the important new economics blog by free-market advocate, Professor Mark J. Perry of the University of Michigan. Relentless data debunking the defenders of the stimulus and bailouts, as well as the absurd comparisons of the current situation to the Great Depression. Like I said: an important blog.

What is "The Elite Eleven"?

You can also follow me on Twitter, and even submit any post here to your Twitter account, complete with title and compressed hyperlink, simply by clicking the "Tweet This" link at the bottom of each post.

And don't forget the various other (less active) links — YouTube, Flickr or Netflix — in the left sidebar.

Finally, those of you on Facebook can also link to me by sending the standard Facebook invite to: kipesquire@kipesquire.net. I do not have a MySpace page.

Stay connected…

Little or no substantive blogging until Saturday at the earlier. Maybe a Kip Clip or CuteTuber™ or two in the meantime.

Enjoy the rest of your week.

(Comments are closed for this post.)

Be sure to follow me on Twitter though.

You can also follow me on Twitter, and even submit any post here to your Twitter account, complete with title and compressed hyperlink, simply by clicking the "Tweet This" link at the bottom of each post.

And don't forget the various other (less active) links — YouTube, Flickr or Netflix — in the left sidebar.

Finally, those of you on Facebook can also link to me by sending the standard Facebook invite to: kipesquire@kipesquire.net. I do not have a MySpace page.

Stay connected…

See you Friday.

–Effectively immediately, the RSS feed will be summary-only rather than full content. You will have to click through to the website to read full entries. (The feed URL is unchanged; you can subscribe via any of the buttons in the left sidebar.)

–Ads will be placed a bit more prominently (i.e., higher up on the page). Don't worry, there will of course be no pop-ups.

Thanks as always for your continued interest.

I'm thankful for my readers. With however many millions of blogs there are, I know shelf space is limited. The fact that a few hundred people choose to find the time to read my posts each day is truly astounding to me, and I'm truly grateful.

I'm thankful for the comments people leave on my blog. Writing is of course more time consuming than reading, and the fact that what I write is provocative and evocative enough to generate responses reminds me how important it is to research, proofread and self-fisk my work before I post it. Comments must be earned, and I'm thankful that people think I've done so. I'm also thankful that people understand that I can't respond to every comment left at every post. Time constraints simply make it impossible.

I'm thankful for the people who send me emails. I'm very bad about responding to all the emails I receive; the people who send them deserve better. But I'm running at full capacity as it is, and of course new blogposts must always take priority.

I'm thankful for my blogroll. That there are so many people who are so smart and such good writers restores my confidence in the state of our intellectual world.

• I'm thankful for the libertarian bloggers who refuse to let dream of a proper society with a proper government go gentle into that Red State / Blue State night.
• I'm thankful for the blawgers who help keep my legal training from atrophying.
• I'm thankful for the econo-bloggers who try to help us understand the world in no less real and important a sense than do physicists.
• I'm thankful for the political bloggers, of whatever leaning, who help me see the events of the world in new ways.
• I'm thankful for the science & medicine bloggers who foster and perpetuate my sense of wonder at the universe, our planet and the human body.
• I'm thankful for the gay politics bloggers who, in their very special way, fight the good fight toward equal rights and basic human dignities.
• I'm thankful for the bloggers in the gay community who share their personal and social lives through their blogs and remind us why we invoke the image of the rainbow.

Finally, I'm thankful for anyone else who has earned my thanks in some other way that I may have overlooked.

Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

Popehat is a group blog focusing (actually, "focusing" is probably not the best word) on "games, politics, humor, and snark." It's the most eclectic blog I've encountered since — well, since my own. In any case, good stuff. Check them out.

Popehat replaces Outright Libertarians.

What is "The Elite Eleven"?

My Blogrolling Policy

Writing a weblog today isn't the bright idea it was four years ago. The blogosphere, once a freshwater oasis of folksy self-expression and clever thought, has been flooded by a tsunami of paid bilge. Cut-rate journalists and underground marketing campaigns now drown out the authentic voices of amateur wordsmiths. It's almost impossible to get noticed, except by hecklers.

I went through my first "blogging mid-life crisis" over the death of trackbacking in the wake of trackback spam, circa early 2006. There was no better way to pull in new readers than to insert a quick "More thoughts at …" linkfest, which would lead readers of the other blog back to mine. WordPress still offers trackbacking (and its internal equivalent, pingbacking), but the feature is essentially dead. And that's a great loss for blogging.

And I probably could do a better job of inserting meta-data (e.g., Technorati tags) into the posts, or using outreach features such as Reddit, Digg and StumbleUpon.

Still, I think that the piece puts the "doomed to failure" cart before the "why one blogs" horse. In order to fail at a goal, one must first know what the goal is. If one's blogging goal is simply to be "widely read," then perhaps the article is correct and the pursuit is futile. But what if the goal is merely to reach someone, especially in the same cultural niche as yourself? Not even Facebook (and certainly not Twitter) can outshine traditional blogging for, e.g., a gay libertarian to connect to other gay libertarians.

And then of course there is the sense of self-accomplishment that comes, not from being read, but from having written. It was Dorothy Parker who said, "I hate writing, but I love having written." I embrace that attitude wholeheartedly. Think of Phineas secretly breaking the swim record in A Separate Peace, or Howard Roark saying to Peter Keating, "I will have designed Cortlandt." All that matters is that I know what I've accomplished; for others to know is nice but not especially urgent. I care less about how many people read my blogposts than I care about making each post the best I could write, and thereby being proud of having written it.

One other observation:

Twitter — which limits each text-only post to 140 characters — is to 2008 what the blogosphere was to 2004. … As a writer, though, I'm onto the system's real appeal: brevity. Bloggers today are expected to write clever, insightful, witty prose to compete with Huffington and The New York Times. Twitter's character limit puts everyone back on equal footing. It lets amateurs quit agonizing over their writing and cut to the chase.

First of all, expect that 140-character limit to expand, perhaps by orders of magnitude, as Twitter gains in popularity — much like memory in PCs and then iPods and cell phones.

More importantly, what's so great about constraining Tweet length? It's a bug, not a feature. The point of Twitter is to make microblogging easier, not to make it compulsory.

Throughout the early years of my blogging, I always resisted the urge to post one-line "check this out" posts in the style of Glenn Reynolds or Andrew Sullivan. I thought it would dilute and debase my blog. Now I have Twitter for that kind of posting. Those who trust my judgment can subscribe to my Twitter feed as well as to my blog. That enhances my franchise; it doesn't constrict it.

Facebook, meanwhile, is a different creature altogether. Given its strict privacy controls, that is where I can really let my hair down and say anything (truthful) I want about anyone I want. Which, at this particularly moment, should make a certain group of people rather nervous, given the (truthful) things that I am quite eager to start saying about them. More on that somewhere down the road, when the time is right.

In any case, blogging, microblogging and social networking are no different than any other personal pursuit: you get out of it what you put into it. Furthermore, like any other personal pursuit, your expectations will either be reasonable or unreasonable. Sometimes the "failure" is in the expectations rather than the results. In that sense, the Internet really is nothing new.

The bottom line is that I am secure enough in my blogging to view Twitter and Facebook for what they are, tools to build, not tools to tear down.