One of the things for which I’m most thankful for blogging is the huge number of really great people it’s helped me meet.  Before this blog started, I was a fairly-newly-divorced guy, pretty much head-down with kid stuff and maintaining a career in a then-deteriorating software market.  The blog, and the show after it, introduced me to an awful lot of people.  Some have become fast friends, others co-conspirators, still others acquaintances whose company I relish. 

Gary Miller paid me a really nice compliment on Thursday:

While linking for accuracy is the currency of the ’sphere, few outside of the likes of Hugh Hewitt, Glenn Reynolds and a handful of others can be said to be truely effusive with their praise of small(er) fry.

Few, that is, with the notable exception of Mitch Berg…For the past several years, Mitch has generously found ways to to shine a light on the best blogging in town. 

It’s hard not to; there’s so much of it!

Seriously, thanks, Gary.  This region is crawling with great blogs – almost too many, in the sense that there are so many that are so good, and only so many hours in the day to read ’em.  There are dozens of absolutely essential bloggers in the upper midwest who may clock between 30 and 200 visitors a day, each of whom deserve an order of magnitude more. 

And it’s hard to start a blog these days.  Chad and Brian and I had this conversation after the show years ago (and it gives me pause to note that the NARN’s been on the air long enough to be able to say anything was “years ago”) – we are all keenly aware that we got into blogging back when there was still a lot of sod to be turned; when a lot of blog readers’ habits were just starting to form.  It gave us a lot of positive inertia.

But even then, Shot In The Dark got on the map due to the very kind, mostly-undeserved attention paid it by the likes of James Lileks, Hewitt, and especially Glen Reynolds (and, one glorious evening in 2004, all three of them simultaneously, online and on the Hewitt Show) as well as the Powerline guys, Gerald Van Der Leun, Kim Du Toit, and many more. 

So while I don’t believe in Karma, I do  think what goes around comes around.  And I do believe in making sure the world – or the part of it that reads Shot In The Dark – should see some of the great bloggers lurking in the Twin Cities. 

And so I hatched a plan. 

But more about that on Monday.

UPDATE:  Of course, it’s more than just the Twin Cities. 

This entry was posted by by Mitch Berg on Friday, July 13th, 2007 at 11:09 am and is filed under Blogs. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.