Thanks to Horologium for linking to us. It's a good site. Check it out. In other blog news, the always avant-garde Sasha Castel and the boys from Dodgeblog have merged into one single blog, giving you not one but four good reasons to click on Sasha's site. This is quite likely the beginning of something new. Blogs are no longer a trend; they've matured. There's been a shakeout of a lot of the warblogs that started up post-9-11 or post-Sullivan, Kaus, and Reynolds. The blogs that had just one thing to say, that they were angry about 9-11 and wanted justice to be done, have mostly folded. Only the polyblogs (I think it's a better term than "warblogs"; it implies that you deal with many subjects, and "poly" sounds like the first half of "politics", which is one of the subjects that a true polyblog deals with) that had many different things to say have stuck around. For examples, look at the way such bloggers as Jane Galt and Sgt. Stryker have constantly expanded the number of subjects they write about, and they both changed the formats and names of their blogs when their lives changed. Jane and the Sarge, of course, are committed bloggers, but most people would just give it up when they got a challenging new job or moved all the way across the country. For instance, I quit for a month, in August, when I was on vacation in Kansas City. I think a lot of current bloggers are going to give it up in the next few months, or certainly years. We're going to get married or get new jobs or move to Seattle or have a kid and "full-time" blogging will become impossible. I mean, blogging is cool, and if it didn't exist a lot of people would be a lot worse-informed than they are, but if your blog's more important than your life, your priorities are wrong.

Sasha and the Dodgeblog boys have come up with a solution to this problem by merging their already well-established blogs. I imagine that we'll see a lot of mergers within the next few months as people who want to continue blogging come to see it as a solution to the problem of not being to post at least every couple of days. Merging looks like a very convenient way of assuring that there are always a lot of high-quality new posts up on a blog and that traffic will remain high, as the new merged blog will reap the collected goodwill of both established blogs.

Anyway, I think that there will be a continued influx of new polybloggers to take the place of those who just plain drop out, and established polybloggers will increasingly merge with others instead of simply giving up their blogs altogether when their life situations change. I really think mergers will provide more and better blogs, as people who post less frequently will average higher-quality posts.

I don't know what the rest of your bloghabits are, but I find I can't keep up with more than about thirty blogs. I check in with all the ones on my blogroll at least once a week, and there are a few others that I look at occasionally that I really ought to link to. I check InstaPundit and the Spain-Europe oriented blogs every day and four or five others--Jane Galt, Steven Den Beste, Sullivan and Kaus, Samizdata--at least every two or three days. I imagine most blogreaders are sort of like me in their habits: there's a limit to how much of blogdom we can absorb at once. Merging blogs will reduce the number of blogs within our personal bloglimits, without giving up and allow us to read and keep track of more new, up-and-coming blogs.