Some interesting thoughts on that subject in the Guardian (always a pleasure to see the word desuetude) and Sharpe’s Opinion:

Reading between the lines of ‘Smeargate’ (can we really not have a better name) and the expenses scandal, we see Maximus Decimus Meridias removing his helmet and standing up to Commodus. We saw “a slave become more powerful than the Emperor of Rome”. We saw a few people sat at computers turning the Government into an object of ridicule.

I’d like to think that perhaps, just perhaps, the reason so many people have gone so quiet is that they know they’ve won, that they’re being listened to, and all we have left to do now is wait.

Hmm. My own puny stats (such as they are) are down this month too, after some steady growth for a few months.

Part of the problem with blogging is that to keep the site moving one has to post pretty regularly, which means that one is going to run out of interesting and inisghtful new things to say all the faster.

Are people turning into Twittering twits instead? Or is it pre-summer exhaustion and boredom setting in? Something else? All combined?

In any case, the point is not to crack open an old decaying order lavishing gifts and ‘expenses’ upon itself using public money. See these astonishing examples of decadence at the BBC.

The point is to use the free-wheeling power of intelligent networked pluralism to create something better without descending into chaos.

Demolition is the easy bit.

On we long-distance bloggers trudge.