Thanks very much for visiting my site. I regret to say that because of various pressures, I’m going to have to stop writing for it, though I will leave the material here for “posterity” (or until my claim on the domain name runs out next year, whichever comes first). A good blog requires a lot of time, and I just don’t have the time to do it well.

I came to blogging late; as I began to explore this world over the past few weeks, I was shocked by the quality and variety of the work out there, and I wondered how I could have remained ignorant for so long. There are many bloggers doing excellent work, and they do it better than I could.

If you haven’t yet started reading blogs, I urge you to start. As the reports from major media outlets become more and more homogenous in this age of spin (read this article if you think that the New York Times hasn’t fallen victim to this), getting your information from a diversity of sources is more important than ever. But there is far more to blogs than politics. Whatever your interest or point of view, you are sure to find someone similar out there documenting their experiences in an unfiltered format.

There are easy ways to keep track of blogs. You can visit a site like bloglines, which will let you set up feeds from various blogs and news outlets. The beauty of this is that you can tailor your news to your interests–if, say, you like food, you could set up a feed from the NYT’s Dining section, as well as to various other food sites like Chowhound (well, actually, Chowhound doesn’t offer a feed, but I just had to mention it). After you have set up a free account on bloglines and subscribed to sites you’re interested in, bloglines will show you when new articles have been posted on those sites.

You can also set up a portal page for yourself on my.yahoo.com, and subscribe to different feeds (the various sections of most major newspapers now provide such feeds). my.yahoo.com will show you the five latest articles/blogs posted on those sites.

A third option is to download the Mozilla Firefox browser, which I heartily recommend given all of the security holes that have been found in Internet Explorer. (while I’m on the subject, everyone knows that they should be using a firewall if they have a dsl or cable connection, right? Zonealarm has a free one that I use. You should also run Ad-Aware and Spybot (both free) on your computer routinely in order to avoid spyware and adware.). Anyway, Firefox has an extension called “Live Bookmarks” that will keep you abreast of things in this world of ones and zeroes.

Before I go, I want to recommend a few specific blogs that have won me over, and that I think deserve your attention:

James Wolcott is the most consistently witty and entertaining blogger I have found.

I’m a lifetime fan of The Gadflyer after reading it only once. I hope that the leadership of the Democratic Party starts paying attention.

The Daily Kos is a great resource for those interested in political news.

So, that’s it, at least for now. Thanks for reading.

Matt

UPDATE: Reports of the death of this blog proved to be exaggerated

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