The answers to Jennifer's queries are that it was a spur of the moment decision to do this feature. The iniative came from Nicholas Gruen, who is the chair of The National Forum, and is a joint undertaking with Nicholas and Ken and the others from Club Troppo. My understanding was that Troppo was just going to publish a list, but that they then came up with the idea of publishing the whole of the original post on OLO so as to expose the pieces to a wider audience. I didn't know we were doing it until a few days before Christmas, and I'm grateful to Ken and Nicholas for the idea and doing the work of pulling it together in the first place.

In discussions with Nicholas I understood that the list would be left open during January with the possibility of adding blog posts to it, so that it would be to some extent a work in progress. OLO was inviting submissions over the Christmas/New Year break.

It's been billed as an annual event, so hopefully next year we'll be geared-up much earlier. We might even be able to find a sponsor to provide prizes.

From an oldie with a post-grad in the general social sciences, including Honours in Third World Problems, as well as praised for insight from American tutors, do feel the use of blogs has become a codism by-passing precious historical insight and commonsense and leaving the running of our Western world in the hands and minds of not the real thinkers but more the manipulators of modern techno' methodology, meaning that though memory is retained, depth of memory is not, thus neither is deep reasoning and insight.

Certainly our present unipolar leaders seem to be severely suffering from it.

If there's any spaces left for best blog posts of 2006, I'd like to suggest a post by Tim Sterne:

http://sternezine.blogspot.com/2006/09/what-im-not-reading.html

Being a selfish egomaniacal glory hog, I'd also like to propose a post of my own:

http://willtypeforfood.blogspot.com/2006/02/writing-book-review-for-age.html

Thank you.

I've come a bit late to this discussion, but if I can still add a suggestion ...

Rodney Croome's piece about the passing of Richard Carleton was one of my best blog reads last year:

http://www.rodneycroome.id.au/weblog?id=P2112