Some of you may remember that last month I participated in the Mystery Topic Challenge #4 sponsored by Blog Ninjas.  My entry ended up winning (thanks!), and as such, I get to choose the topic for Mystery Topic Challenge #5.  For those of you interested in participating, you can sign up here.

If you’re unfamiliar with the Mystery Topic Challenge (MTC), how it works is that once a month a member of the group puts out a topic of their choosing.  All the members of the group write a blog post on the topic and post it one week after the topic was announced.  They then read each other’s blog posts and vote for the best one.  The winner of the challenge gets to decide the following month’s challenge topic.

I get asked constantly by bloggers (esp. new ones) how they can increase exposure to their blog.  Well kids, here’s a great way to do that.  Participating in the MTC will bring a lot of readers to your site, and if you’re lucky, they’ll keep coming back.  I was fortunate enough to gain several new readers as a result of taking part in the last MTC.

The whole point of the MTC is that you sign-up before knowing what the topic is.  I’ll announce the topic tomorrow over at MTC, so try to sign up today if you can.  If however you see this after I’ve put it up, don’t let that stop you.  You can still participate!  You just need to leave a message on the MTC boards letting people know that you’re going to take part.  On the day that the blog entries go up, be sure to leave a link to yours on the MTC boards as well.

I can’t stress this enough for those of you who have asked me before: this is a fantastic opportunity to generate exposure for your blog.  Don’t let it slip by.

(Updated - see below)

WARNING: Rant ahead!

I received the following e-mail this evening from a guy named notKyle:

I was seriously interested in your blog as a gay guy living here in the US… that was until I had to read the typical gay political, narrow minded, one-sided BS that’s spewed from just about every other gay source. I respect your right to your opinions, although I disagree with them. I went to a 99% liberal high school in California and my only lone republican friend was as closeted about that as I was about being gay. Everyone respected each others opinions there, however, but more importantly, they knew where it was appropriate as a topic, and what things were appropriate to discuss in a particular venue. I believe that you are saying the wrong things in the wrong venue, and you have alienated and eschewed aside the republican portion of our gay population. The basis for my political views are far broader than my simply being gay, and I think it’s irresponsible to assume that all gays are liberal for the same reason. I am no longer interested in your blog. Yes, I do understand that it’s YOUR blog, and you can write anything you please, regardless of the audience or who it alienates, but as I respect your right to your opinions, I sincerely hope you may learn to have some respect for your fellow REPUBLICAN gays out there, and keep the random political BS out of your blog. Until then, I have no interest in reading any of it.

As a side note, I do not wish to turn this into a big email ping pong match… so, take that as you will.

I’ve received numerous e-mails both in favor and against the more political slant of my blog, but never one like this.  Yes, yes, I know I used to write a much more humorous blog, but do you know how much work that was?  It’s not easy trying to right something funny day after day.  Ask Bossy.  Or Craig.  Or Famous Author Rob Byrnes (wait, FARB’s not actually funny, he only thinks he is ).  I found that I felt like I was performing for you all rather than blogging honestly.  My heart wasn’t in it anymore, so that’s why I took my hiatus over the summer.  When I came back I decided that I was going to write about whatever was on my mind.  Recently that’s been a lot of politics.

Now notKyle in his e-mail says "you are saying the wrong things in the wrong venue" in regards to my political-minded posts.  Excuse me???  First off, what does he think are "the wrong things"?  Is that anything that might be progressive in nature or something he doesn’t agree with?  I’m sorry, but I’m not only entitled to my opinion, I’m allowed to voice it as well.

Secondly, how on earth is blogging my political beliefs on my blog inappropriate or using the wrong venue?  I don’t get paid to blog.  Nobody owns this blog but me.  I created it, I pay for its hosting fees, and I own it.  I’ll be damned if I’m going to be told what topics are appropriate to blog.  I supposedly live in a land of free speech.  If I want to blog about politics or Britney Spears or the high price of tea in China, I can because it’s my friggin’ blog, not notKyle’s.

Neither notKyle nor any of you are required to read my blog.  It’s just like television: if you don’t like what’s on, change the channel.  If you live in a free country like America you can read or not read whatever web sites you want.

After my initial anger at notKyle’s e-mail, I began to wonder why he felt the need to actually sit down and write me an e-mail rather than simply stop visiting my site.  Is he that threatened by the things I post on my blog?  Is he worried that I might be right some of the time?  Or worst of all, is he afraid that I just may open other people’s eyes to my liberal way of thinking?

I know of several right-wing gay men who are almost venomous towards any gay liberal.  They accuse us of not thinking for ourselves or "drinking the kool-aid." They seem to believe that only gays who are conservative and/or Republican are independent thinkers.  Bullshit!  I have thought through and even researched many issues other than just gay rights, and I’ve chosen my position on them.  It happens to be progressive.  So what?  In fact, I’m proud of that fact.  Would the gay conservatives advocate that I change my beliefs just to prove I’m not going along with the crowd?  To me, that looks like the actions of someone who isn’t thinking for himself.

In conclusion, let me make this clear to all my readers who are wondering: am I going to continue with the political slant of my blog?  I don’t know.  I’m simply going to post whatever is on my mind and that I’m passionate about at the time.  That might be political, it might be funny, or it might just be about my dogs (yet again).  Right now I have three different things in my head I’d like to turn into blog posts this week, and not a one of them is political.  That may change though. 

I appreciate your readership and hope that you will stick around to find what’s next, but you are always free to surf somewhere else if you don’t like what you find here.

Rant concluded.

UPDATE: I sent a link to this blog post to the writer of the e-mail.  He replied and asked me to take the post down "not because I am ashamed of what I have written, on the contrary, but due to the nature of my job and certain policies put in place, if you catch my drift."  I won’t take down the post because too many of you have already seen it, and I don’t think there is anything that specific that identifies the writer of the e-mail.  The only things we know about him from the information above is his first name, he’s gay, and he went to high school in California.  Nevertheless, I changed his name to protect his identity.

I was going through the links on my blogroll tonight, and I was surprised to find how many of the blogs have gone defunct.  I’m not always first to know that a blogger has committed blogicide (a term I’m borrowing from this site) for sometimes weeks or months after it happens.  That is primarily because I don’t usually visit a blog directly; I subscribe to its feed through Bloglines.  If there are no new stories appearing, I’m not really notified of that.  I just read the ones that have been updating and remain blissfully unaware of any particular blog’s demise.

So what’s going on?  Not only do I see a lot of blogs dying, but I also notice a change in the readership.  Whereas before I used to get comments on my posts from a broad spectrum of bloggers and non-bloggers alike, I now seem to get comments from a core group of you.  I appreciate you loyal readers, but I wonder what happened to the larger group.  Everyone who blogs knows that comments are a blogger’s heroin, so it’s not lightly that I say I’d rather do with less comments if they were from more of you.

It’s only natural that the blogosphere should change and evolve over time.  The history of the Internet so far says that what’s popular online today most likely won’t be two years from now.  Is that happening now with blogs?  Have they outlived their place in the online world?  Have people instead turned to sites like Facebook to meet and reconnect with friends?  Or is it perhaps when blogs started going corporate that the blogosphere lost its spirit?

I don’t know.  Maybe I’m Chicken Little running around proclaiming the end without any reason.  Maybe the more political nature of my blog recently has turned some people away, but I’m not writing this post to garner sympathy.  I’m not trying to get you to leave comments that would inflate my ego.  All I want to know is your take on the current state of the blogosphere.  Is it still developing or is it on a decline?

If you are a lurker on my site, and trust me, I would be the biggest hypocrite in the world if I condemned you for that, now would be a great time for you to delurk and leave a comment to let me know you’re still out there.  I don’t care if all your comment says is "Hi."  This isn’t meant as a cheap ploy to get comments; I just want to feel that sense of community in the blogosphere again.

UPDATE: In order to help foster the spirit again, I’ve turned on a WordPress plug-in called "Commentluv."  If you leave a comment and put in your blog’s address, it will attempt to read the information from your blog’s feed and post a link to your latest blog post with your comment.  It make take a couple of seconds longer for your comment to post because of this.  Unfortunately this only works as the comment is being left, so old comments will not be updated.  Only new comments will have the link automatically added.  This is strictly in trial mode.  If it slows down my site too much or otherwise causes problems, I’m pulling it.  I’ll rely on your feedback.

Ugh… the blog awards season appears to be upon us again.  I am still getting over the nastiness that was last year’s awards.

I’ll say this up front: I don’t put too much stock in any of these blog awards even though I have been a finalist in some of them in years past.  For one, there is no single association or standards committee that handles the awards like the Oscars, Emmys, or Tonys have.  Many of these awards have been created by websites or groups I’ve never heard of before, and it seems little more than a cheap stunt to drive traffic to their sites.  I’m especially suspicious about the ones that carry ads (as opposed to contest sponsors) on their voting and results pages.  Those pages quickly rack up thousands of page views and make a hell of a lot of money for the award site’s owner.

Secondly, many of these "awards" let you vote multiple times so that the award itself is nothing more than a popularity contest.  Very few of them define the methods that they use to arrive at their finalists.  Were they names picked out of the hat?  Were they decided on by nominations from the blogosphere?  Or were they chosen because the administrators of the awards felt these sites would bring in the most amount of votes and therefore page views?

Finally, it seems like some of the best blogs in a category fail to get nominated.  I’ve said before that I think David of Someone in a Tree should be a finalist in many of these contests because he represents some of the most important aspects of blogging: quality and consistency while keeping his focus on his life as a gay man.  Yet David has never been nominated for an award to my knowledge and admittedly poor memory.  Likewise, there are many of you out there who write fantastic blogs that also deserve nominations but are overlooked.  I would love to single out all the blogs that I think are award-worthy, but it’s probably easier if you just go look at my blogroll.

Now it may sound like I have a bad case of sour grapes.  I know that I would think that if I read this blog post, but I really don’t.  I would love to see some sort of official blog award be created with clearly defined nomination and voting processes.  I’ve been nominated and have won awards in the past, but honestly, I have always thought there are people out there who have deserved the award more than me.  I just put up some eye candy, and suddenly my blog got popular.  It’s still drivel though. 

Nevertheless, now that I’ve thoroughly removed all the joy from their nominations, I was quite pleased to see two of my regular reads as finalists in this year’s 2007 Weblog Awards (though I think more than one award contest is using that name).  They are:
 

• The Billerico Project for Best LGBT Weblog: Think of The Billerico Project as the love child created if The Huffington Post and our infamous "gay agenda" were to mate;

-and-

• I Am Bossy for Funniest Blog : I just love Bossy to death.  Her blog is one of those that makes me snort my two-buck chuck through my nose while reading it.

 
Now I would never tell you who to vote for (oh who am I kidding?), but you can vote for The Bilerico Project here and I Am Bossy here.  From what I understand, you can vote in each category once per day so keep going back again and again and again.

I’m not trying to diss any of the other finalists*, but I don’t think you can go wrong with either of these two blogs winning their categories.  They are both excellent in their own way.  Best of luck and sincere congratulations (despite what I said above) to both of them.
 

*OK… maybe one blog, but I’ll never tell so don’t even ask.  If you know me then you already know which site I mean.

A spammer tried to hack my blog this morning.  Comment moderation has been turned on temporarily as a safeguard.  I don’t plan on using comment moderation permanently however; only until I can look at the attack in more detail later today.

Update: Everything should be hunky dory now.  I strengthened the security of my site a bit, upgraded to WordPress 2.3.1, and changed around some plug-ins and options.  I don’t think anyone was successful in actually hacking into my WordPress account, but some spammer managed to slip by my comment spam guards overnight and bombard my blog with comment spam.

I’m reluctant to use too many anti-spam techniques that place the burden on you, the commenter.  An example of that is the popular anti-spam technique called "captcha."  With captcha, the person leaving the comment is shown a series of letters and numbers.  He must then type the series in a box in order for his comment to be accepted.  While highly effective, I have lost too many comments I’ve tried to leave on other blogs because I accidentally transposed a number or letter (maybe I’m mildly dyslexic… or just an idiot who can’t type).  To me, losing a comment that I wrote is extremely annoying.  It’s rare that I will rewrite the comment again when that happens.  I don’t want that to happen to you all when you try to leave a comment on my blog, so I’ve never put in place a captcha system.

I’m also reluctant to institute across the board moderation of comments.  I like to see the comment I’ve left on a blog go live immediately.  Using the moderation technique seems to diminish the back and forth spontaneity of the conversation in a comments thread.  I’ve seen some blogs where the blog owner doesn’t get around to approving the comments until days later.  By then most people have stopped checking back to see if any new comments have been left.

That being said, I am making one concession to fight spam: If you have never left a comment on my blog before, your first comment will go into moderation until I approve it.  Once you have at least one approved comment on my site, all your future comments should go live immediately.  Also, all pingbacks/trackbacks will go into moderation since these are the largest source of comment spam on my blog.  I certainly hope that instituting this change won’t hurt the lively discussions we sometimes get into in the comments on something I’ve posted.  If you feel that it does, I’m open to your feedback.

BTW, for those of you using WordPress (not the hosted-version at WordPress.com), I highly recommend using this plug-in to automate all your WordPress upgrades.  It worked like a charm for me.