A friend to everybody is a friend to nobody. -Spanish Proverb Since I began my blog back in April, I've accumulated over 50,000 page views (52,491 as of this writing) and 279 people tracking me. This is far more of both than I ever anticipated back when Monco59 and ChiliDragon were the only two people reading. Back then, it was very easy to automatically "track back", that is, to track all the people who were tracking me. However, were I to attempt to do that now, I would very rapidly go insane. (Or "more" insane, depending on how you choose to look at it.) With this in mind, I think it is time that I laid out some understanding of how I choose to track certain people and not to track others. Randomly. Very randomly. Obviously that comment is a bit tongue-in-cheek. I don't select completely at random who I'm going to track, but I am very convinced at this point that I am undoubtedly missing some very worthy people to track.

Generally speaking, the people I have chosen to track fall into multiple categories below: 1. They're on the tracked blogs of people I already read, which exposes me to their writings. (Met PAJ89 this way.) 2. They're very active. I see their comments frequently on my blog or other blogs. (xboxrulze is a good example. So is veni-vidi-vici) 3. I've read one or more things that they've written, and liked it. This can be either a blog of theirs, a forum post, a blog comment, etc. (yeah_write or Bozanimal are examples) 4. Someone has recommended them to me. (raven28256 came with ChiliDragon's recommendation, so I started reading his stuff and liked it.) 5. I got into a debate with you during a time of disagreement and was impressed enough that I started tracking. (Monco, GabuEx or Vainn are good examples) 6. They're soapbox bloggers. (Sad but true that this is a great way to get people reading your stuff, since it has a broad reach.) 7. They sent me an example of their writing and deliberately asked me to come read it, and I did and liked it. 8. I'm friends with them offline. (Dawngrrl and ChiliDragon for example) Now this isn't automatic. I've added people in the past based purely on a whim at the time, but usually I try and only add folks who are in more than one category up above. But one thing that I won't automatically do is track back someone who is tracking me, for the simple reason that I take it as a serious responsibility if I choose to track someone. It is an implicit way of stating that I intend to read the majority of what they write in the future and try and comment frequently. In other words, I'm committing myself to actually spend time and effort on following what that person does. This is where my proverb at the top comes into play. The true meaning about the proverb is that people, having finite time, who try and be friends to everyone end up being bad friends because they just can't spend the amount of time, effort and energy that true friends who keep their circle relatively small can.

A couple of days ago I mentioned that I was likely going to post a "Super Tuesday" breakdown of what happened in the Democratic and Republican primaries on Feb 5th. Since then, I've reconsidered a bit. My hunch, and it is only a hunch, is that the majority of my readers probably don't want to see my blog space become a political blog. If they want blog related political thoughts, there are plenty of other places that they can go to. Feel free to correct my thinking in the comments if you disagree.

However, I did get selected to be one of the Idaho delegates who will attend the state convention. At the state convention I'll be among a couple hundred people from all across the state who were selected to attend. Out of this number, roughly 18 (don't know the exact number off the top of my head) will be selected to attend the National Democratic Convention. If I go to the National Democratic convention, I'll be one of those "delegate" votes that you keep hearing about on TV who will directly select the Democratic nominee. Pretty cool huh? Anyway, it will be an interesting learning experience and maybe I'll blog a bit about it if people are interested.