BlogCrawl

It's a quiet day in the vastnesses of Big Government...so I'm going to step outside of my cubicle into the wide world of blogging, going link by link, blog to blog.

Watchblog is the first stop. I'm a contributor to this multi-author political blog, but I don't know any of the others' blogs, so it's a good way to jump into the unknown. I'll start with a liberal...

American Pundit blogs on how much of Asia views the United States: as a rogue nation.

Pimme is on the deacon's board of an Amsterdam church, and gripes about the fact that they switched to verbal voting on congregational decisions, essentially killing dissent. What he misses is that democracy is a bad way to run a church to begin with.

Casablanca is a middle-aged Texan who thinks that having to pay child support after a divorce is reason enough not to marry. Of course, if he waits a few more years and marries someone his own age, he won't have to worry about children at all.

Male Matters is way cool - I might even permanently blogroll it. However, he hasn't updated in almost a month (too much college football?), so I'll see. Like me, Male Matters is miffed by Verizon's "stupid dad" commercial. Why are men always portrayed as the dunces of every family?

The League of Anti is run by a female, but calls itself anti-feminist. She's got some very amusing news bits, including Rep. Don Nickles warning against feminist terrorist cells and a fictitious feminist organization declaring the First Law of Thermodynamics hate speech.

Gizmodo, the popular - popular as in 140,000 hits per day - blog dedicated to gadgetry. In response to the same study that InstantReplay mentioned, someone has allegedly developed a "Chill Pak" to keep men fertile while they use laptops. So far, very little for women in this crawl.

Nick Denton is Gizmodo's publisher and (of course) keeps his own blog. He insightfully calls the 2004 election "an American electoral version of the Battle of Verdun. A gigantic expenditure of noise and fury, leaving the frontlines in US politics exactly where they were before." Just without all the dead Europeans.

Jason Calacanis is tongue-in-cheekily pioneering the field of 'blog ethics'. With the growth of blogs as a way of introducing consumer products, Jason and others have become concerned with "word of mouth" marketing groups, who blog for cash. When someone recommends a product, you want to know if they're being paid to do so. His blog is putting its money where its mouth is, holding a contest for a schnazzy clock-radio sent to them as a bribe gift from Google. The winner? Whoever has the best answer to the question, "What would you do if you were in charge of Google?" Give it a try!

Inside BzzAgent is the blog for one of the marketing word-of-mouth concerns. It features a nifty map whowing dots where all of its agents are around the country. A very good estimate of where and how thick the online community is in the U.S. Unfortunately, it's also a dead end. One thing you'll find online is that links go up, on average, and small "ma-and-pa" blogs tend to have fewer outgoing links and far fewer incoming links. But once you get out of the blogosphere and into the MSM (mainstream media) or business world, linkage stops. The last few sites had me ascending the staircase from blog to business, with fewer and fewer links along the way. A good crawl, to be sure.