Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader found an interesting bit on the Reuters news wire today. It was: Blogs Abuzz with Gossip in Caustic U.S. Campaign.

Now, your Maximum Leader didn’t jump on the bandwagon during the whole CBS - Bush Memo thingie. This was, in part, due to the fact that the monomania with the story throughout the blogosphere was just a bit too much for him. (That and the fact that your Maximum Leader just didn’t have anything to add to the din of voices.)

But something that the CBS story has done has been to cause the mainstream press and bloggers themeselves to examine the nature of blogging as it pertains to current news stories. Hence the title of the Reuters piece, blogs are gossip. (At least according to Reuters.)

Of course, not all blogs are gossip. Not all blogs are independent news sources. This is not to say that there isn’t a lot of gossiping on blogs. There certainly is. As far as your Maximum Leader can tell, gossip is all you get over on the Wonkette site. (No link to her. Your Maximum Leader excercises discretion concerning the trollops to whom he links.)

Here at Nakedvillainy.com, we don’t have a research staff. We are not “out there” looking for a scoop. We are sitting around* and commenting on items that evoke a isceral/hormonal reaction.

We are commentators. Sometimes we comment on current events, other times on life in general. We often comment on each other. But your Maximum Leader doesn’t believe that any one of us blogging here would claim - or frankly want - to be labled as a reputable source.

In the aforelinked article, the good language-neutral people at Reuters talk about “Self-styled Internet commentators.” Humm… Self-styled? Really now. Do you need proper credentials to be a “non-modified” commentator? What exactly would those be? Is a certain amount of TV face-time a requirement? Perhaps a requisite number of printed column-inches of material on the editorial page of a newspaper with a circulation larger than the number of people working at the Reuters offices in Brisbane? Aren’t a bunch of old guys sitting around in front of a general store in Frog Level, VA talkin’ politics all “commentators” of a sort?

Michele at A Small Victory, had a wonderful post a few weeks ago about the nature of “post-Rathergate Blogging.” There does seem to be a change occuring in a number of blogs. Some do want to move towards the strata of near-news sources. Some are cashing-in on new-found traffic. But a goodly number haven’t changed at all. To the best of your Maximum Leader’s knowledge, we haven’t changed here a bit.

But there are lots of things that could cause us to change. Michele touched on a number of them. Blogads for example. Your Maximum Leader has considered running blogads. (Just to get a few extra bucks a year.) But then there is a pressure that your Maximum Leader doesn’t want. How to justify a particular rate to advertisers? Should you care about your content out of consideration for advertisers? Of course, they are aesthetically nasty too. So there is that as well.

Aesthetics are the same reason that your Maximum Leader has never put a SiteMeter thingie on this site. They’re ugly.

Then there is a desire for more traffic. Really now, who doesn’t want more site traffic. But at what cost? Your Maximum Leader doesn’t obsess over his site server statistics. It is nice to know that we are getting about 200 unique visits a day, but if that number is still 200 in December that is okay. Your Maximum Leader appreciates blogging for the sake of blogging.

Ah well… This post really went nowhere… And that is okay. Because this is just your Maximum Leader’s blog. And he can do whatever he wants on it.

* Excursus: For those of you who care… While we “sit around” and blog what do we wear? Your Maximum Leader sits around naked except for his bejeweled floppy hat you see him wearing in the masthead graphic. The Big Hominid sits around with a white lab-coat covering his nakedness. The AirMarshal sits around in khakis, polo shirts, and wielding a slide-rule calculator. The Minister of Agriculture sits around in cow manure-stained Dickie overalls and an old, faded, John Deere cap. The Minister of Propaganda sits around in silk pajamas he picked up on Rodeo Drive with a bevy of young naked starlets feeding him peeled grapes. And the Foreign Minister has taken a shine to wearing Lederhosen that chaff his delicate cuticle; but he doesn’t feel the chaffing due to the copious amounts of beer he drinks. So there…

Carry on.