Call it unwarranted optimism, or a tough habit to break, but I still find myself visiting Gail Armstrong’s openbrackets.com website, weeks after she closed up shop. It’s kind of sad there now: shutters closed, paint starting to peel a bit around the doorway; a Weimaraner turd or two calcifying in a corner; and wasn’t that a tumbleweed blowing through the frame just now, right to left?

I could always count on a fresh perspective in Gail’s openbrackets postings, some sharply observed insight hand-crafted in a few paragraphs of lovely prose. I’ll miss them. Her final posting could be read as a wistful epitaph for blogging in general:

We’ve had a good run but it’s no longer fun. Or useful. And I admit to a certain — perhaps misguided and no doubt ludicrously precocious — nostalgia for a once more intimate web, one with less of a noisy strip joint about it.

According to stats from Technorati, “the blogosphere has been doubling in size every 6 months or so. It is over 100 times bigger than it was just 3 years ago. […] As of July 2006, about 175,000 new weblogs were created each day; […] more than 2 blogs created each second” — that’s staggering. All those millions of people out there writing, writing, writing: who will be left to read?

In those early days (and yes: it is strange to wax nostalgic for an earlier part of this same decade) you’d track down the good blogs by following little digital trails of enthusiasm back towards their source. And if you liked what you found you’d bookmark it, maybe share your discovery through a “call out” posting, before adding the new site to your list of favorite links (just there: on my left, your right).

openbrackets wasn’t the first of my regular text-addictions to pack it in; mango pudding blues and textism also wound down their blogging enterprises recently, moving on to more rewarding pastures (I trust). They each leave a gap and the usual flurry of good intentions; but who knows when — or whether — I’ll hear those unique and particular voices regularly again?