Jonathon Delacour the heart of things

Welcome back to not blogging, Mike

In a weblog anti-entry titled Not to Be Confused With a Blog Entry, Mike Sanders writes:

In some ways it is harder to restart blogging than to start blogging. Especially if you have used up a lot of your Emotional Bank Account and have been de-blogrolled for inactivity and other less benign reasons. Is there a place on Technorati or the Blogging Ecosystem for blogrolls you were removed from? Is there an unstated law of de-blogrolling reciprocity? Doing any of the blogging books discuss this? Where are the blogging authorities when you need them? The questions are always better than the answers!

I kept Mike on my blogroll for nearly two months after he quit in late December last year. When I decided to redesign my blogroll just over a week ago, I checked keeptrying.blogspot.com and received a 404 Page Not Found error. That seemed definitive enough so I de-blogrolled Mike for the benign reason of inactivity. However, I should have realized that a 404 from a Blog*Spot weblog doesn’t necessarily mean that the blog has disappeared. When friend told me today “Mike’s back”, I checked again and found two earlier entries (in addition to the one I quoted):

• Is This Thing Still On? (Monday, February 03, 2003)
• To Blog or… (Friday, February 14, 2003)

If only Blog*Spot hadn’t flaked (or if only the Pyra-Google deal had gone through months ago), no de-blogrolling need have occurred. But, to look on the bright side, just as The Ronettes used to sing: “The best part of breakin’ up is when you’re making up”, we could say that the best part of de-blogrolling is when you’re re-blogrolling. Today, courtesy of blogrolling.com, the convenience of bookmarklets, and the magic of PHP, it took less than a minute to re-blogroll Mike Sanders.

I thought about writing an entry when Mike quit but didn’t, for two reasons. Firstly, for some reason I felt sure that he’d be back. More importantly, Burningbird said pretty much all I wanted to say when she answered my question about whether she would include in her Comfort Food Posts any entries with which she vehemently disagreed:

To answer Jonathon, the first post I was going to link to and excerpt in the new system was Mike Sanders’ post on removing people from his blogroll. I considered that one to be pivotal within the weblogging history I hope to capture.

There are few weblog postings that have had as much of an impact on me as Mike’s. Based on this posting, between one moment and the next, weblogging had changed for me. It was no longer me writing in a vacuum; it was about me being part of a community, one in which conflict exists in addition to comradery. As difficult as the events of the time were back then, the end result is that weblogging became a much richer experience for me. For many of us. And I would be less than remiss—less than honorable—if I weren’t to acknowledge this.

Mike brought much of the battle he retreates from on to himself. He used the term moral equivalency as a stone on which to stand and look down on others. He re-interpreted viewpoints in a manner almost guaranteed to frustrate the originators of the viewpoint. He used labels as weapons. He also sent emails to people that would exacerbate an already tense situation. Mike introduced conflict.

However, Mike also started conversations. He got people to think. He helped us to understand the power of this medium and he made us all realize how much impact simple words, and simple links, and simple actions, could have.

Mike and I have had our disagreements. I have little doubt we’ll have some more (since today I began seriously to consider putting to one side the deep bitterness and antipathy I feel towards “anti-war protestors” and joining the anti-war protests—if Australian troops are committed to a war on Iraq without UN sanction). But I’ll never forget how thrilled I was when Mike added me to his blogroll, after I’d been blogging for just a few weeks. I learned a lot from what Euan Semple once described as Mike’s “thoughtful metablogging.” I started like everyone else—with a traditional link+quote+comment weblog—but it was Mike (amongst others) who helped me to realize that blogging had an ethical dimension, that words and links have consequences, that blogging could be thinking+feeling+writing. As he says, “the questions are always better than the answers” and Mike had the knack of framing challenging questions. That’s why I kept him on my blogroll for so long after he “quit”—out of respect and gratitude.

As it happened, Mike’s decision to abandon blogging occurred within a day of Burningbird’s decision to eliminate her blogroll, so there’s a glorious synchronicity in the fact that Burningbird changed her mind and revamped her blogroll within two days of Mike’s providing definitive evidence that he’s blogging again:

I am still not blogging. This is not a blog entry. Don’t be fooled.

According to expert opinion, “a weblog post can be identified by the following distinguishing characteristics: a date header, a time stamp, and a permalink.” Sorry, Mike, you’re blogging. Welcome back.

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