Billmon's Whiskey Bar in Wired

One of the best political bloggers is interviewed in Wired

Wired News: Bloggers Suffer Burnout:

In the days following the U.S. invasion of Iraq last year, a new blog called Whisky Bar quickly became a popular online destination for opponents of the war. The site's author, who ran the site as a virtual bar with himself as the bartender, encouraged visitors to share their views on the topic at hand.


Over the last six months or so, however, a surge in traffic has transformed Whisky Bar into something more like a jam-packed nightclub than the cozy neighborhood watering hole the site's owner, known as Billmon, had originally envisioned. His postings often generated hundreds of comments, each of which he moderated.

But running the website soon became a dominant activity in his day, and on June 28, Billmon announced: "Last call." Whisky Bar would no longer accept comments.

"You've only got so many hours in the day, and like most bloggers, I've got a full-time day job, and something had to give," Billmon said. "In the end, monitoring comments on my blog was becoming a progressively larger part of my blogging time, and I just got to the point where I wasn't able to keep up with it."

Still, cutting readers out of the conversation was a disappointing solution for Billmon, a former journalist who relished the kind of feedback newspaper reporters rarely get.

"When I started out, I really wanted (Whisky Bar) to be very interactive," Billmon said. "That's one of the most exciting things about blogging, that ability to have dialogue with your readers."

I'm hoping that, when the summer is over, and there is less incentive to be outside, the mighty Billmon will reopen his bar, or I tell you we will die.....