The Washington Monthly’s decision to hide Kevin Drum’s blogroll in a pull-down menu no one is likely to find was a noticeable blow to the left side of the blogosphere, at least if my experience is typical.
On a typical day with no item link, CalPundit used to send me about 120 visitors. That site still sends me about 20 a day, suggesting that some people are visiting it just for the blogroll, but the Washington Monthly site sent a total of 21 visitors last week.
However, today I had my first item link from the new site, and it produced the biggest one-hour surge my site has ever experienced. For the day, that link alone produced more than 1100 hits. ( Matthew Yglesias, Cursor, and Eugene Volokh also made big contributions to this site’s biggest day, at 4500 unique visitors and 7000+ pageviews, compared to weekday norms of just under 2000 unique visitors and just over 3000 pageviews.)
I suppose if the spinning hit-counter from an Instapundit link is an Instalanche, the analogue from a Political Animal link must be an Animal Stampede.
However, I still hope Washington Monthly reconsiders its blogroll policy.