Blog Labels

It's interesting sometimes to notice where you wind up in a categorized blogroll. Take for example the link to me on two blogs I would consider progressive, Alas A Blog and Nathan Newman. Alas lists me under "To Alas' Right," which confused me, making me think that maybe Amp or bean had visited on a day I was being particularly contrarian, and thus got a skewed view of where I stand. Then I noticed two things: 1) There's an "Even further right" category, where all the actual conservatives live, and 2) I was in good company in "To Alas' Right," being listed with Matthew Yglesias and Calpundit, probably my two favorite political blogs. All this made me remember that Alas is a progressive/lefty blog, and so one could be quite liberal while still being to their right. Then I was re-confused by the fact that someone like skippy the bush kangaroo would be listed under "Blogs of a Feather," since (partisanship of our tone aside) I would have said that skippy and I agree on the substance of most issues. Indeed, I probably agreed more with skippy than with those of my category-mates whose blogs I knew well, since the latter were liberal hawks with last-minute regrets rather than opponents of the war all along.

For a while I thought there was something screwy with the TTLB Blogosphere Ecosystem, since it listed me as having a link from Nathan Newman that I couldn't find. Apparently the trick was that Ctrl-F is case sensitive, and Newman went ahead and capitalized my blog name*. Now that I've discovered that, I've found myself listed under "Progressive Blogs." This was a bit odd to me, since I don't identify with the term "progressive" (though perhaps my politics fit someone else's definition of "progressive" -- one professor once told me he admired my "unique brand of radicalism"). In this case, "progressive" seems to mean "left of center," since the category seems to be basically "other blogs that I don't read with any regularity, but which exist."

All this is not to accuse Alas or Newman of miscategorizing me. It's just an observation of how one's self-image can be called into question by how other people categorize you.

* I'm still not sure why I don't capitalize it. As my post titles and article headlines indicate, in general I prefer to err on the side of too much capitalization. But after two-plus years, I'm kind of attached to the lower-case title.