It's never enough, is it?

Michelle Malkin is taking a brief blog hiatus to work on other stuff. That's tough for a blogger to do.

Those who've read "How to Get a Million Hits On Your Blog" know that the greatest challenge for a newbie independent blogger is getting past The Zero Hour: That 3 a.m. moment when you check your SiteMeter and your latest hourly traffic was . . . zero.

I've joked about this with the Blogospheric Neologian, how in The Zero Hour the temptation is to give into bloggernoia, defined as the suspicious belief that other bloggers aren't linking you because of envy, spite or other malevolent motives: "Dan Collins is just jealous of my superior blog-fu! Dan Riehl, too! All these Dans are in on the conspiracy against me! Bwahahahaha!"

No amount of traffic, however, can ever fill that hungry vacuum in the blogger's soul. So even on a day when we've already gotten not just one Instalanche, but two, I find I'm still checking the SiteMeter obsessively, like that lab rat hitting the cocaine-dispenser in the psychology experiment we all remember from our college textbooks. (Hmmm. Why is that one of the few things we actually recall from our college textbooks?)

"I can quit anytime I want!" But of course, you can't. You're a stone traffic junkie, and even if your traffic was so huge that Matt Drudge was begging you for linkage -- hey, you gotta think big -- you still wouldn't be satisfied.

Anyway, just to show that I can do it, I'm going to let Frequent Commenter Smitty take over this evening. Rule 1/Rule 2 blogwhores should e-mail their stuff to Smitty for the next several hours.

I'm going out on a date with Mrs. Other McCain. Readers are invited to contribute to our big romantic date by hitting the tip jar. (Chicks dig a dude with a big tip jar.)

Remember: All UR Links R Belong 2 Us!