Oh yeah. This is gonna set the political world on fire.

…in case the post gets lost down there — we raised more than three thousand dollars for Hearts and Homes. Since Sunday. During a holiday week, with lighter than usual traffic.

You people are okay in my book.

…and I would like to read Gawker, if only to find out what the cool people are doing while my wife and I hang out at home and rent videos and play with the dog and stuff. But the site is a mess on both of the browsers I have installed on this computer, with links which overlap the entries and make the whole thing unreadable, and bizarrely placed margins which fill up most of the window with blank space before I can even get to the unreadable text.

So what’s the deal? Is this the online equivalent of those New York fashion trends I can never quite keep track of, the stiff blue jeans with cuffs rolled up exactly four inches (or is it six?), the ugly glasses with thick black frames and yellow lenses, the extreme hip-huggers that ride about halfway down exceedingly fashionable New York City butt cracks — whatever it is this week?

Do you need some sort of special browser that only Manhattan hipsters know how to install before you can read this thing?

Or is the difficulty of the site some sort of metaphor for the difficulty of life in New York? You know: you’ve got to put up with a lot, but it’s worth it in the end, wouldn’t browse anywhere else, yadda yadda yadda?

Or maybe it’s just that the version of IE I’m using is at least six months old, and therefore hopelessly bridge-and-tunnel.

Update: a slightly newer version of IE seems to have resolved the problem.

However, so many of you raved over Mozilla that I decided to give it a try — and promptly spent about an hour and a half dealing with crashes, hangs and installation problems. I wish I lived in that wonderful parallel universe so many of you apparently inhabit, in which new programs are easy to install and invariably worth the effort… but I do not.

Now that we’ve finally dispensed with all the ludicrous get-rich-quick new economy bullshit of the nineties, it turns out that one of the killer apps of the ‘net is elegant in its simplicity: people writing down their ideas and discussing what they think about other people’s ideas.

And let us posit that this is a Good Thing.

But let us also posit that there are two common traits shared by many, though certainly not all bloggers — a tendency toward self-absorption, and a fascination with the latest Cool Tech. (And I’ll plead guilty on at least one count, though I won’t admit which one.)

These trends have recently converged to threaten us with something called “video blogging,” or “v-logging.”

And that’s certainly the lesson to be learned from the popularity of blogging, isn’t it? Let’s take this marvelously simple and straightforward format and add as many unnecessary bells and whistles as possible, make people suffer through downloads and buffering time and digital video glitches — because if there’s one thing people don’t have enough access to in their lives, it’s talking heads reciting copy which could be much more easily digested and pondered if presented as straight text with links. Yes, that’s what we really need in this world of round the clock cable news and talk shows — even more droning commentators. Amateur droning commentators. Oh yeah. That’s gonna take off.

You know what this sounds like, is one of those painful and quickly forgotten Inevitable Next Big Thing articles that Wired Magazine always used to run, back in the day. Video blogging. Jesus Christ. You know the old line about giving someone an inch and he thinks he’s a ruler? You give some bloggers the slightest taste of public attention and they think they’re freaking tv stars.

The people from Hearts & Homes report that in the space of a couple of days, your donations have totalled more than three thousand dollars.

And I promise you, that’s going to make a difference.

So go on, pat yourselves on the back. You deserve it. (And I’ll keep you updated on further developments.)

(And by the way, go over to Wil’s site and send some good tidings in his wife’s direction. A day after he put up a note on his site about Hearts & Homes, he and his wife had to spend New Year’s Eve in the emergency room because she was bitten on the lip by, yes, a recently rescued dog. Talk about cruel irony…)

They’re taking nominations.

Just in case anyone’s, um, you know, interested.

Okay then.

…to Digby. He’s new in the neighborhood, and there’s no better blogwarming gift than traffic. (Via Atrios.)