Summer is usually the dead zone for blogging and maybe that is part of what is going on but the Gen X 40 brand has pushed its way up to #11 on the list of Canada’s Top 25 Political Blogs for the summer 2009. We have to be honest about a few things:

• This is truly driven by the beer blog, the domain partner. It has been years since we enjoyed the heady traffic of 6723 visits a day or whatever it worked out to be back in 2005-06. But beer is a Canadian cultural topic of such importance that I feel no shame.
• Nonetheless, being ahead of Small Dead Animals (#15) is a cheeky treat. Even though I can't read the thing, you have to admire its success. I feel no such surprise about leading Mr. Currie and Mr. Taylor. That clearly speaks for itself. People obviously want a pudgy soft-left alternative with a beer tap attached.
• The death of Michael Jackson as well as the tragic events at Kingston Mills lead to a spike in search engine traffic to the site over the last few months... even though the posts were not about those topics - that's the beauty of six and a half years of archives.

So, it is fun but frankly blogging ain't what it used to be. All the fun stuff is happening on Twitter and Facebook - and probably not even there any more. Stand alone home brewed blogs have about as much currency as MySpace. But for those of you who actually come here regularly still, give yourselves all a great big #11 for the day. This is after all about traffic and not content. Somewhere in the Yukon there is a blogger with poor bandwidth and rotten search engine rankings who is much more interesting than me.