NTodd/Atrios & The Fiddlefaddle Rule

Yesterday I made a rare visit to Eschaton," the site of the famous weblogger, Atrios. Six or seven posts down into his entries that day was one that caught my eye and held it to the exclusion of the others. Extremely terse, as most of his posts are, it read simply, and with no explanation, "NToddler is such a loser." And attached to that was a thread that contained 355 (!)comments.

I recognized the name. NTodd is the somewhat rambunctious proprietor of the "Dohiyi Mir" site. That was one of the first sites that drew me into the weblog world and led to my creating this site. Dohiyi Mir impressed me because it was the first -- and so far the only non-chess-oriented weblog -- that I've seen that had a chess diagram on its home page, and because of that and his general though sometimes edgy friendliness, for a time I would frequently leave comments there. In the process, in fact, soon I even became an inconsequential part of "history" when NTodd and G.A. Hall, the writer of "Rook's Rant," engaged in what they billed as the first ever blogging chess game, during which I was a regular kibitzer.

You would think that because I was so impressed and chess is so into my blood, that I would have a diagram decorating my own sidebar. And indeed I have access to thousands of end game studies and other positions that would be just right. Even if a person couldn't work one out, it would still be highly decorative. But that's one of the many things I need to get around to, including changing the look of this site in a couple of other ways. But I'm still too happy with the way it looks now.

Eventually my orbit and that of Ntodd drifted in very different directions -- or rather mine stayed where it was while his widened exponentially. Through his tireless excursions into the progressive weblog world, NTodd has made a real name for himself, to the point where he was one of the most celebrated participants in an event that is taking place this weekend in Philadelphia and which, as it is the brainchild of Atrios, is called "Eschacon08." It is a convening of many of the most well-known progressive weblogists, and, in recognition of his stature, NTodd shared nothing less than the keynote panel with Atrios and two others. Therefore I can say, to a very modest extent, that I knew him when.

So what happened between Ntodd and Atrios?

I started slogging through the first of those 355 comments to find out, but almost instantly that thread had become bogged down in what I call "the FiddleFaddle Rule."

I have trouble understanding why Atrios is so renowned, because whenever I've checked, his statements are on the sparse side, and instead the lion's share by far of the offerings on his site are made by his numerous adherents, and meanwhile the Fiddlefaddle Rule is usually in effect. This law just recently codified itself in my mind while I was observing the Angry Arab Follies, though I had long before observed it at work in Eschaton and other hugely popular sites, which is why, as a rule, I seldom read them. My Law says that no site, however large its number of frequenters, has enough of them who are able to make more than about a hundred sensible comments on one thread in a single day. Beyond that number you can assume that things have descended, if they haven't earlier, into bitter mud-slinging, or excursions into extreme trivia, or into other forms of complete babble. And so it happened in response to Atrios' "Ntoddler" post.

But at least one sane voice, Ellroon, was there. She is familiar to me because the name of her site, "Rants From the Rookery," seems to have been directly inspired by Hall's weblog, and I believe she sometimes posts on Steve Bates' site and on Andante's, and I think she even posted on mine once or twice, long ago. She was the first to ask the Atriots the same thing that I wanted to know, which was, what did NTodd do? She was ignored. Later several others asked that as well. Still no answer. Instead there was just a lot of unintelligible banter, seemingly designed, as one guy said, only to keep the comment count up.

After giving them the benefit of those first hundred comments I finally came to my senses and decided I'd go right to the horse's mouth, Ntodd's "Dohiyi Mir."

These days NTodd is much more consumed by posting photos than he is by using words, and he had plenty that he had snapped at Eschacon08. When he wasn't displaying those he was linking to pictures on other sites that included images of him, and he had nothing to say even about what was happening at the convention, except that it was hard to take pictures of the lady participants because so many of them had "no pictures" stickers on their convention badges, and well they might, I thought, with him around!

Eventually on one of those other sites, I learned that so far the panelists had decided that the election is going to be a contest not between the Democrats and the Republicans but between the Democrats and the media instead, because the media is so enamored of John McCain. So it's going to be the job of those assembled webloggists to find ways to bring McCain's shortcomings more to the national attention. But how? The answers to that were not immediately popping into the attendees' heads.

Meanwhile I never did find out what NTodd had done that had aroused so much of Atrios' disdain. I'm guessing it was just a clash of similar, large egoes. You don't get where they are without those humps in the camel's back.