I've read Andrew Sullivan's blog for a while - mainly by RSS. Click to visit.

Andrew Sullivan is a writer I respect. And that’s for a lot of reasons, whether I agree with everything he says or not.

Elements of his ‘The Daily Dish‘ blog have been widely copied by the less imaginative* (Mental Health Break, Face of the Day, Quote of the Day, Tweet of the Week, blog ‘awards’) along with countless of his posts, videos, links, insights, smack-downs, and wry laffs — with or without acknowledgement, ‘hat tips’, or squiggly unicode curation symbols ᔥ ↬ etc.

Sullivan — a magazine editor and columnist (bio on wikipedia) — is influential. His is an Internet success story based on a background in ‘old media’ (boo hiss [/s]), talent, dedication and focus. I enjoy him a lot. I appreciate him acknowledging his POV, being ‘man enough’ to acknowledge his loud, partisan support for Bush’s invasion of Iraq was a mistake based on fear.

Besides POV, I enjoy Sullivan having an attention span. Does he run crusades? Oh yes, at times. And his contempt for some of his targets is palpable, but he’s not a liar. And that’s a very important distinction in these times of ‘culture war’.

Sullivan is also a classic example of what I mean when I say MEDIA will absorb all ‘new media’ and make it part of the borg … just as Art swallows up the Romantics, the New Romantics, the modern era, the post-modern era etc ad infinitum. (‘Resistance is futile.’)

Sullivan is doing well, apparently, with a regular audience of millions, including my ‘umble self, usually by RSS (and recently Flipboard on my iPad). I think his popularity and RESPECT is partly because unlike some of his spittle-flecked imitators, it seems to me he is open to genuine discussion and criticism, rather than building a partisan echo-chamber and abusively swearing at non-believers. Look:

Home News
It’s now been a year at the Beast and I’m happy to note that our traffic this past year reached 91 million page views, up around 26 percent over our last year at the Atlantic, and our monthly readership of around 1.1 million individual people across the planet is as solid as ever.
Thanks as always for your loyalty, engagement and criticism.

Congratulations to him. Way to go.

– P

* ‘There is nothing new under the sun’ (Ecclesiastes 1:9) and ‘Great artists steal’ (Picasso? Steve Jobs) apply, natch.

PS I cop criticism here and elsewhere from time to time (even in the last few days) from commenters who (quite rightly) dispute my POV or raise an argument against something I’ve said, or how I said it, or my selective focus. That’s fair enough. Have at it. Let’s discuss it.
As I said with respect to my experience at PropertyTalk:

A discussion forum is a democracy. Posters stand or fall on the quality of their information and their expression of ideas. No-one is ‘owed’ respect. I have my detractors. So does anyone who posts.

If I publish or say something ridiculous or patently false, I should anticipate ridicule and my false information to be pointed out.

Go ahead, criticise. Make a case, be as ‘negative’ as you like — best leave character attacks and hallucinations about ‘motivations’ out of it — just the facts, as strongly as you like and present the evidence to illustrate or support your point of view.