The quote Catherine excerpted below about 80,000 blogs launching per week reminded me of a story I read yesterday: the Register totalled up the societal costs claimed by various pop-economic doomsayers (e.g. the NCAA tournament costs $X billion in lost productivity; failing to recycle bottle caps costs us $Y billion every week). And guess what? It turns out that the sum is more than the total amount of money in the world.

To be fair, I don't think there's any solid economic reason why that can't be true — but it certainly seems doubtful. To think that spending half an hour watching an NCAA tournament game actually introduces real costs to an individual's employer requires a childlike naivete, wherein every workday contains exactly 8 hours of work, all of which must be completed and all of which is relevant to the company's bottom line. I can understand why one would think such aggregate measures are necessary and plausible at a large scale. But realistically, most of these cost estimates probably ignore a lot of naturally-occurring elasticity in order to make their advocates' pet causes seem more important than they actually are.

the post's city guide just added a somewhat cool feature to their establishments' info - you can now send the name, location and phone number of a bar, restaurant, etc to your cellphone. that's neat, but it would be better if they would do a couple of things: actually publicize this in a venue beyond their post.blog, which is a neat blog but not widely-read by the kind of people who would actually be using the cellphone feature (maybe a post on the GOGblog as well? or a note on the front page of the city guide). second, and maybe this is in the works as far as i know, it would be cool if they had a google-ish text message feature, where you could SMS a particular number with a zip code and a description of what you're looking for - beer, chinese, whatever - and the city guide would send you back what's available in that area along with a brief descriptive blurb from the city guide's review. i'd hit it.

this has to be one of the stupidest opinion pieces i've ever read: this woman claims that the reason we traipsed so happily into the iraq war was that not enough people were reading newspapers. i'm sorry, was she even reading newspaper articles and columns around that time?

Think a little further. If more Americans had had a comprehensive view of the world -- the kind that is irrevocably blurred by the 80,000 new blogging sites launched every week -- it would have been barely possible for the 30 people who in essence started the Iraq war to have acted without the accord of the American people.

yes. the iraq war is the fault of bloggers and their dastardly plan to have readers read them. shite newspaper reporting had nothing to do with it.

that's the first ridiculous point. the second ridiculous point is basically that the reason for circulation declines is the readers' fault (with a healthy dose of blogs, of course). god forbid anyone ever think that maybe people don't read newspapers as much anymore because maybe newspapers aren't delivering what they need. the condescending view that only newspapers can properly educate people and the reason they're failing nowadays is the fault of the idiotic american public is one of the things that is sure to rile me up into a frenzy.

"My theory is that we Americans have so picked and chosen our news that we have lost that comprehensive view of the world that only a newspaper gives."

huh. if only we could do something about this...something like not allowing people to pick and choose what they want to read...perhaps a government-licensed newspaper that everybody is forced to read? that sounds like just the ticket!

for what it's worth, my chicago friends, i had a very accurately-detailed dream last night that george ryan, the former illinois governor charged with racketeering and mail fround, was found guilty of about half of the 22 counts. (the jury is in their sixth day of deliberation right now after a five-month trial.) seeing as i have previously proven myself to be a political oracle, i think we should assume that ryan will be spending at least part of the end of his life (the dude's nearly 80) sitting on his bum in jail.

anyway. sorry for the lack of posting up until now. i'm sick and miserable, tommy leaves for seattle tomorrow for a few days (bah!) and i have all these things i'd promise myself i'd do during break not getting done (i HAVE done well at drinking tea and watching the food network, though; how i miss cable!). so, i'm a lazy git. hopefully i'll be inspired later on.

It's strange, but I think we may be running out of internet. It might just be me — but I don't think so. Catherine's been complaining of the same thing. I now frequently find my RSS reader empty, forlorn. Oh sure, Wonkette can be reliably counted on to fill up a feed with entries I've already read, since its authors are now pathologically incapable of leaving a post unrevised. And sites like TUAW and Gizmodo reliably spam me with totally uninteresting posts, thanks to the Dentons and Dobkins of the world deciding that they earn their pay with quantity rather than quality. But post volume seems to be down on the good blogs — by which I mean my friends' sites.

Certainly, I'm guilty as well. Although the site's traffic has mostly levelled off, I feel a lot more pressure to tone down the bloggy self-indulgence here than I used to. I know that people who are professionally, personally or just plain old important to me stop by here with some regularity, and that makes me think twice before rattling off a thousand-word screed about how such-and-such or so-and-so ought to be publicly euthanized for society's benefit.

There are other reasons, too. In the last year or two, many of my friends' online lives have taken on a more professional character. By and large, this is fantastic — I'm incredibly glad that Kriston is getting paid to blog, that Catherine is writing papers on RSS, and that I can claim "blog reading" on my timesheet. But it does sort of change the way the whole thing feels. The days of pretending to work in a Crystal City cubicle, furiously penning Wonkette-bait are over.

It's pretty stupid, in retrospect — approaching the internet like a private clubhouse for you and your buddies. But I'm still sort of sad to feel the thing become complicated. I don't think there's a solution, short of fleeing to MySpace. And I'm not prepared to debase myself like that.

For what it's worth, I'll do my best to be a little less self-conscious about writing here. There's no reason we can't reclaim the heights of lowly self-involvement we once reached.

POSTSCRIPT: Aaand before even hitting publish, I've already violated my new resolution. There's an entertainingly passive-aggressive anonymous note plastered all over the men's room. I doubt it's from a coworker — but this is a shared office space, so there's no telling. So: no putting it on the internet. Drat. But just between you and me, anonymous bathroom-note-author, I'm not the one who's been peeing on the seats.