SHOP TALK. The only trade fairs I have willfully attended were the New Music Seminar and the CMJ, and I recall them as small hells of self-promotion. As blogging has even more competition, lower barriers to entry, and fewer commercial opportunities than music, I can only imagine that a Blog World Expo would be even worse. The participants certainly look like less fun than, say, GWAR and Henry Rollins. I can see the logic for exhibitors, though: might organizations like this be why the Ole Perfesser is constantly going on about some new skillet or juicer?

But I concede that, as silly as it is to approach blogging as a business, it may be even sillier to approach it as a means toward elevating discourse. Take Hindrocket's account of what he saw at the Expo:

About half the participants in both panels were liberals; these are the people who had me thinking I had passed into a different world, and entered a sort of bubble inhabited only by leftists.

The first panel went off, inevitably I suppose, on Iraq. What was striking was the dogmatic nature of the liberals' assertions about what is happening there. Things aren't getting better; things can't possibly get better; the facts don't matter, it's tautological...

I'm pretty sure the number of people who think the facts don't matter in Iraq is quite a bit less than 70%, and I'm also pretty sure that a political movement that explicitly declares its indifference to reality is in trouble.

He had to go to Vegas to write that? Well, the year's almost over, so I guess it was time to tap out the Power Line distance-learning budget. alicublog's was tapped out on the morning of New Year's Day with a few calls to 900-BIG-BUTT.

(BTW, this Blog World post contains what must be the line of the day: "Blacks in America have become the perfect laboratory for the consequences of annihilating traditional sexual mores. At 70% illegitimacy, they have destroyed civilization at the molecular level.")