Blog post gets new life.

In the last day or so, I've gotten more traffic to this old post than to the front page of the blog. It started when RedState wrote this, calling attention to what I'd written over a year ago about how lefty and righty bloggers have treated me. RedState, who seems to have kept the old post in mind all this time as something to reflect upon periodically, writes an elaborate post. Excerpt:

With a Republican majority in both Houses of Congress, a majority of the electorate having voted for a Republican president, and a lot of libertarians and a fair number of centrists and even liberals supporting the war effort, we are working in a very big tent right now; the "RINO" population is booming. Of course, having people in our coalition who don't always support all of our goals - or who, in some cases, support only a few of our goals - can be intensely frustrating. Any one of us can tick off the names of elected officials who drive us up the wall - John McCain, Chuck Hagel, Lincoln Chaffee, Arlen Specter, etc. (And that's just the Senate). There are also plenty of pundits and bloggers who are on our side on the war, or the economy, or the culture, or the law, but not all of the above. In the blogosphere, there are centrists like Althouse and libertarians like Glenn Reynolds, Megan McArdle and Stephen Green. The pundit world even includes people like Christopher Hitchens and Nat Hentoff, arch-liberals on many issues who are nonetheless steadfast allies on some questions.

Anyway, from one issue controversy to the next, we may find ourselves on the opposite side from some of these folks. And therein lies the temptation to go the Kos path, and dissolve into spittle-spraying rage when people who are "supposed" to be on "our side" cross over and side against us. That's the situation where we need to think carefully about how harshly we go after people's motives, their intellectual integrity, etc. A ritual bridge-burning may be fun, but that's how you end up stranded on your own island.

Good point! Hardcore Democrats ought to do the same, and not just because I like people to be nice to me.

Anyway, yesterday, Best of the Web had a link to the old post (with no reference to Redstate), just a quote from me and some brief agreement. Then Instapundit linked to it.

Meanwhile, Sissy Willis and Steven Taylor were noticing all the action they are getting from the time I linked to them over a year ago, and both of them wrote to ask me what's going on. Here's Sissy's old post -- replete with photo of busted up Li'l Greenie. Here's Steven's. Now Sissy's got a new post about the revival of the "Right and left: my sad experience" conversation.

It's funny about blogging. You get so intent on putting the next post at the top, pushing all the old posts down. Blogging is a process of piling on and accepting the endless sinking of whatever isn't newest. But, watching the Site Meter page, you see where new visitors are arriving. Regular readers keep coming to the main page for that newest post. Extra readers tap in at individual new posts when other bloggers link to the posts you've put up recently: you see traffic at one of today's posts, maybe yesterday's. There are always a lot of visitors that come via search engines. Some of these arrive at posts that have had a steady, if low level popularity. (My classic post of this type is "The 'therefore' symbol.'" On any given day, somebody somewhere feels like reading about the therefore symbol and finds that post.) Others come to an old post that talked about a specific subject that has reappeared in the news. But it's quite unusual to experience a flood of interest to an old post like this one. This is just a case of one blogger remembering something we were talking about quite a while back and having something more to add to that old conversation. And then it seemed new again... and bloggable. That turns around the whole feeling of blogging, that sense that it is always the new that matters.

UPDATE: Vodkapundit joins the conversation ("Ann and I arrived at the same conclusion, even though we chew on different slices of the political pie.").