Rabbit, Rabbit, Rabbit. As the month of July starts, I worry about what and how much I’ll write. I’ll be on vacation. Will I manage to keep my blog up to date during that time? What will happen to my traffic?

I imagine that I’ll have some posts, pictures of Fiona playing in the ocean, or perhaps simply of the waves crashing. Yet I won’t be interacting substantially on the Internet and that will take a hit on the materials I have to work with.

Yesterday, I wrote about confronting the blank page, and my friend Lars pointed me to a couple of articles in the Financial Times of London. One article was about Bloggers bringing a new reality for politicians, where politicians need to be careful about honestly presenting who they are, lest an unscripted moment derail them. Yet perhaps this isn’t a new reality for politicians. Perhaps this is returning us, back to the old reality for politics. We need politicians that are going to be real, authentic, not only when they are in front of a camera, but are authentically presenting their views all the time.

The other article was about one-time online outsiders going mainstream at Personal Democracy Forum. This reflects something I’ve written about from time to time here, and one of my big concerns. As the one-time outsiders become insiders, will they continue to talk with those on the outside? Will they build bridges where bridges have been missing? In a phrase, will they practice the ‘xenia’ that was talked about at ‘Sharing the News’?

It turns out that this lack of xenia is not limited to the realm of journalism or politics. Today, I read a blogpost entitled Cliques: They’re What’s Wrong With the Christian Blogosphere. It has spawned quite an interesting discussion there. Perhaps it is time to queue up Dar Williams “Christians and the Pagans”.