Sadly, I think that Oxblog has lost much of its draw for me. I still read it, out of some sense of brand loyalty or habit, but the loss of Chafetz had a major impact on the quality of the blog.......

Well, this blog went off the tracks, down the hill and into the river around late August of last year. It was as if Dan wasn't even there! But it has since recovered.

Honestly, Instapundit is not a blog I read much anymore. Glenn repeats himself a lot these days, and links to the same sources over and over. He hasn't updated his blogroll in a while either. He may not be bored, but he sounds bored.

Josh Marshall has avoided blog boredom by building a blog empire, an interesting approach. He doesn't write at all on weekends now, a sensible thing because weekends readership is (I understand) lower than weekday readership. A guest blogger, who isn't terrible but isn't Josh, fills in instead. Lynn Kiesling's blog was great for a while, but I found out she was married and that just killed it for me. Maybe that's just an excuse, a pathetic attempt to cover up my declining zest for reading about electric utility deregulation.

Becker and Posner seem to be running out of gas. Eric Umansky has put his blog on hiatus. Phil Carter, back from Iraq now, posts only occasionally; so does Bruce Rolston on the Canadian Flit site. Rich Galen and Bruce Reed (on Slate) are interesting commentators -- Rich is also a fine writer -- but they want to stay active in their respective party's politics and so churn out reworked talking points on a regular basis. This is boring.

I suppose blog readers face the same problem of burnout as bloggers do.

It's interesting that someone would decide to narrow instead of broaden the focus to keep going. I think some blogs remain interesting precisely because the authors include random tidbits and you never know what the topic of the next post will be. (Put another way, you know it may not be one specific topic, which then makes it that much more interesting.)

As somebody famous might say, "heh."

After all, given that I live in Hollywood (right next door to a popular singer who should remain nameless but used to date a big time bike rider), this would be a highly appropriate confab.

Meanwhile, keep an eye on PB.com. The rebranding process is an on-going one.

Instapundit
TPM
Oxblog
Brad DeLong
Wonkette

Credit for not declining even as others do:

Drezner
Kevin Drum
Andrew Sullivan
The Corner

One of the problems with a general-interest blog is that search engines don't know what to do (at least in my experience).

At my site about Air_America, almost all of the searches are related to that topic, its hosts, etc. etc. I get very few odd, off-topic searches.

At my main site, despite having switched to covering mostly immigration_related issues for over a year, because of the older entries discussing things like celebs I get both completely off-topic searches and junk hits from gawkers.

I'd imagine that Bainbridge finds the same thing: at his wine site all the search hits are from wine-related queries, and all the ads that show up are about wine.

BTW, as discussed at my link, our host appeared on a TV show with a lawyer who's involved in a case involving Western_Union and wire_transfer funds being seized to prevent human_smuggling. Maybe our host could get back in touch with him and find out if the Mexican_government or Western_Union themselves are involved in the case in any way.

Belgravia Dispatch: (1) Greg has been understandably late on commenting on current events, (2) he seems to make up for it with posts that are way too long, and (3) most importantly, someone offended him about being a creature of foggy bottom (wherever that is) and his posts are constantly peppered with defensiveness and hostility that is distracting and unappealing.

I hope that Daniel and others information screeners (I mean bloggers) continue to read Greg and post the meat of his posts. I'm on hiatus.