BLOGOPHOBIA: These worries worry me, but I’m not sure what I can do about the problem:

And I think there’s a trend growing in the Blogosphere, as the truly talented bloggers build brand recognition and market share, they start getting too much mail to respond to it all and picking to which mail they’ll reply or post about, much more carefully than in the humble beginnings. They’ve started turning inward, to each other.

They will become the Establishment, The Big Wheels as the Fat Guy called them, instead of the Young Turks, the Outside Looking In. They will slowly cut themselves off from the flow of esoteric/unusual incoming content that gave them their starts as bloggers. Content that they don’t read is content they don’t post, which is content that We Wonder What They Did With when we hear about it from another source, instead of from them.

Well, I sure get a lot of email. I do read it all, usually — unless a bunch backs up when I’m offline for a while. And I try to get to new corners of the Blogosphere when I can. (Like blogs about foot-washings.) I make a point of trying to link to new or different blogs, in fact.

But, yeah, the Blogosphere’s too big for anybody to really know, and now that InstaPundit’s over a year old it’s not bright and shiny and new anymore, and I get a lot of email. That’s life. If I get in a rut, and it’s no fun anymore, I’ll quit. (It’s not like I’ll miss the income, after all.) But it’s still fun for me so far.