Back in the heady days of 2003, when political blogs were all the rage, this custom developed over linking to other blogs. My old, deceased blog Rook’s Rant, had at least 250 links from other blogs. As I said, those were heady days.

As time went by, maintaining a blog became more and more of a chore. I coded my first website by hand. However, that was both too time consuming and overwhelming. Then Movable Type came along, offering a free, though a slimmed-down version of their blogging software. Over time Movable Type itself became too complicated. Also, Rook’s Rant was dying. So I bought myself a new domain name, and Guy Andrew Hall was created.

Today there is no online political blogging culture. Most of the more successful blogs converted to news aggregator sites with fees, such as Daily Kos and HuffPost. What I once called Blogstonia (there was Left Blogstonia and Right Blogstonia) no longer exists. Most other bloggers moved on as political blogging became another past fad.

That’s the way of it, though. Once capitalism becomes involved, free expression becomes suppressed. Not out of any nefarious design to eradicate free speech. It was out of a desire not to turn off readers. Money equals hits and free speech does not make money.

Anyway, this post was initially just an announcement about a new feature in the side column – a blogroll. There are a few bloggers still hanging on. My hope is to scour the internet in search of any other remaining political bloggers.