It's time for the State of the Blog address. Readership is down. My personal guess, from what I figure from the blog stats, is that we haven't lost any hardcore readership--we've got 42 inbound links now and rate as "Floppy Birds" on N.Z. Bear's blogosphere rankings. What's way down are our visitors brought in from Google searches, from other blogs' blogrolls, and especially from InstaPundit. Yeah, the first thing I checked was whether he'd delinked us. He hasn't. This leads me to think that there's a postwar blog slump and that we're heading for a blog depression.

There are an awful lot of blogs now. I discovered them in about November 2001 and started my own in February 2002. They weren't cool and hip yet. Mainly we were a bunch of dorks writing about politics and a bunch of misfits writing about our daily frustrations. Yeah, I know, you're not a real blogger if you started up after September 11. But now that we've all made the New York Times, a lot of people have joined the group of bloggers, which is all to the good. In November 2001 you could almost keep up with most of the good blogs. Now there's no way you could do so, there are so many. This is great, because there's all sorts of wonderful stuff to read; remember, I'm more of a blogreader than a blogger, I spend about the same amount of time doing one thing as the other.

But there's gonna be a shakeout. Whenever some novelty in communication gets big enough that Bill Clinton joins in and major media outlets have to have one and the New York Times is writing about it and my mom, for Chrissakes, has seen the story, it's a fad that's riding high. Regression to the mean, guys, it's gonna happen and I think my stats are a sign of it happening already. We got whipped up into a frenzy of need for information between September 11 and the Iraq war, and I think a lot of people are sitting back and relaxing and thinking that it's all over, so they're not paying as much attention to the news after that year-and-a-half information overload--I mean, we've all heard of Karbala and Uday and Qasay and Umm Qasr and the Fedayeen and Paradise Square and Mosul and Kirkuk and the Marsh Arabs and the like now, which we had no idea about before the war. People are relaxing and blowing off current events to the same extent that they did before September 11.

This is good. But it might be bad.

That's Iberian Notes' solid, unshaken, cast-in-iron opinion.

On the other hand, everything I just wrote above might be a crock of crap and readership is down because a) we've bored the piss out of everyone with the elections or b) we just plain suck and everyone's figured it out.

I kind of figure that we and Ibidem are the blogs of record in Spain in English, so I had to get that election reporting in in detail just in case somebody really needed to know it. Sorry.

Anyway, if you're a regular reader (I know my parents and sister and brother-in-law are readers, and so are my pals Clark, Murph, Damian, and José Manuel), leave a message in the Comments, whether it's for the first time or the twentieth, just so that I'll know you exist.