It's The End Of The Blog As We Know It(And I Feel Fine)

At about 40 months, this site is one of the oldest political blogs on the internet. And in a rather important announcement, it now falls to me to inform you all that it's coming to an end. The site will still physically (or, perhaps, virtually) exist as a useful way for me to store certain things and because there's a chance that it will start up again in the future. But I'm going away for a little Memorial Day Weekend vacation to the Outer Banks in North Carolina and when I return I won't be posting here anymore for the foreseeable future. Instead, I'm going to be joining the team at TPM Cafe which Josh Marshall has been talking about for a while.

A word on how this will work. As Josh was explaining yesterday, the new site will feature a big group blog with a lot of very exciting contributors. I'm not going to be one of them. In addition to the group blog, TPM Cafe will be hosting several additional blogs. One will be a group effort devoted to foreign policy called America Abroad, whose contributors list you can find here. One will be brought to you by the team that did the TPM Bankruptcy Blog, though with its focus expanded somewhat. Another will be my blog, with its same boring eponymous title, its same solo author, and essentially the same content you find here (hence the shutdown of this site).

Roughly speaking, we're talking about the same site with a new URL -- http://www.tpmcafe.com/sections/yglesias -- just don't try and visit it right now or you'll only get the "Coming Soon" page. Nevertheless, some content is already posted and as soon as TPM Cafe opens for business, you'll have posts to read. In addition, as soon as the technical details get worked out, copies of this site's archives are going to be moved over to TPM Cafe which will be convenient for me in a variety of ways and also serves as a token of the sort of continuity between this site and the new one that we're looking for.

On one level, then, very little will change. So why do this? There are several reasons. Most obviously, like guest-blogging on TPM a little while back, it's a chance to get exposure to the broader audience of people who I assume will get sucked into this thing. Most trivially, it's a chance for me to get out from under the burden of running some of the technical and commercial aspects of this enterprise -- I'm a writer, not a web designer or a businessman -- and joining up with the Cafe should lead to better technical implementation with less work. Most profoundly, it's an opportunity to get in on the ground floor of something that could prove to be big; an exciting new sort of media enterprise that involves a lot of excellent people who are, quite frankly, significantly more experienced and more important by conventional standards than I am. Perhaps it will fail, but I think the chances of success are good and if so I'll be very happy to have been a part of it.

What's most important -- and most promising -- for readers in the short term is that TPM Cafe won't just be a bunch of blogs all hosted at the same domain. The technical back-end is driven by Scoop, the program used to build Daily Kos and a few other sites. That means there people who are interested in participating in the enterprise in a more robust way than simply reading it are going to have some much more powerful tools at their disposal. Posts will have comments, like this site, but there will be mechanisms in place that are beyond my capacity to handle alone to police the boards against trolls and generally try to maintain a high level of discussion. There are going to be separate discussion fora apart from the posts. As on Daily Kos, readers will have the opportunity to establish user accounts and start up diaries (i.e., blogs) of their own and contribute to the site. This stuff should all be valuable on its own, but perhaps most importantly can serve to knit the whole enterprise together in terms of the various different kinds of content we'll be hosting.

If you're not in to any of that. If you don't want to read any of the other blogs Josh is putting together, don't want to deal with diaries, etc. you don't have to. If you're a fan of this site and want things to stay the same, you'll just be able to click the URL, read posts, and the only thing different about it will be the design of the page. But I would encourage everyone to look around at the other stuff, and especially encourage the people who've been commenting here to take part in the expanded opportunities TPM Cafe will provide.

Beyond that, I'm still working at The American Prospect, still co-writing Tapped, and generally speaking still doing whatever else it is I do. And spending the weekend at the beach.