Will the last one to leave please turn out the lights?

So Tim Dunlop's classic progressive Australian blog, The Road to Surfdom, has come to a lamented end of the road.

Joining many other favourite sites that have shut up shop since Rudd won in 2007. Shrinking the blogroll at right even further.

Of course, it's neither entirely surprising nor unprecedented. For a lefty Australian blogger, the end of the Republican era in the US - following closely the end of the Liberal Party era here - might well be a meaningful bookend to their online campaigning efforts over the last four or five years (longer, for Tim). And, if the point of your political blog was to do your part to foster change of government, then perhaps this is indeed a good time to call it a day.

But I hope it's not a mass exodus. I certainly haven't finished with this blog yet. It was started as a means of engaging in political disputes without alienating everyone around me in real life. Of thrashing out ideas in a safe, non-threatening environment in which people were just interested in the argument, and wouldn't get offended and bitter about the person making it.

And whilst neither of these expectations were in any way accurately reflected in the subsequent blogging experience itself, I've still found it extremely cathartic. There's a great deal to be said for getting these thoughts - well-formed, half-baked or entirely wrong-headed - down and thrashing them out online. Further, I'm not dead or senile yet (that hits at 35, I gather) - and so long as my brain is functional and capable of taking in information regarding the state of the world, there'll be plenty to write and argue about. Admittedly, much of it will be similar to stuff I've said before - but those battles are a long way from being won, even if one set of opponents has now, for the moment, been defeated.

And of course there'll be other elections. One black Democrat taking back the White House is not the end of history.

In other words - there are always going to be developments that deserve, inspire, require comment. If I didn't have a blog on which to vent, it wouldn't be long before my loved ones would have to listen to it. (Until they took the appropriate steps, anyway...)

In the meantime, if there are slow days, where nothing outrageous is happening in the political sphere about which to write, then I will be beyond thrilled. (It's very, very rare that political news is related to actual positive developments, after all.) Because, and I hope this is apparent to anyone reading this site, I don't bitch about this stuff for fun; I bitch about it because the idea of just letting injustices lie, just accepting that they're the way it has to be, makes my skin crawl.

I think, sadly, there's still considerable mileage in this political blogging caper yet.