Jon Swift Takes Over Crooks & Liars

Well, perhaps that headline is a bit misleading, but Mike Finnigan has graciously asked me to take charge of his Blog Round Up at Crooks & Liars beginning this Sunday, September 23, 2007. I'm not sure why he left me in charge of the round-up, whether it is because it is so difficult to find liberals who are dependable enough to handle such a big responsibility, or whether he is just tired of doing it and thinks handing the keys to me would be a good way to get fired. It certainly is a very great honor and it will be difficult filling Mike's very big shoes but I am steeled for the task.

However, I will need help finding suitably appalling liberal posts to link to so I would appreciate your suggestions. The more links you send me, the less I will have to trawl through the backwaters of the liberal blogosphere. And shameless self-promotion, as always, is welcome. I would like to link as much as possible to smaller blogs rather than the usual suspects because I think they will be more appreciative of the traffic sent their way and consequently feel more indebted to me. And if you have never been linked to by Crooks & Liars before, I will give your link special consideration. So please send those links to modestjonswift@gmail.com from now through next week.

While I am on the subject of bloggish things, I want to mention that I have removed all of the "nofollow" tags that were automatically applied to comments and backlinks on my site, which is a stingy device that removes any credit these links get from Google. I hope that other bloggers will follow suit. However, any spammers attempting to take advantage of my generosity will be dealt with harshly.

Finally, since I think my commenters don't get the recognition they deserve for the contributions they make to my blog, I have decided to inaugurate a new weekly feature where I will select a few of the most interesting comments, emails and mentions of my blog in the blogosphere that you may have missed. You will find the first edition of "Swift Reactions" here and below this post.

Update: My first blog round-up is up at Crooks & Liars. You can find it here. And here are the round-ups for Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday.