Another day, another “bloggers are the enemy” screed from Peter Bart. This time, he’s picking on his “blogger friends” (when did he start making friends with bloggers? And is that safe? He knows we don’t bathe or go outside!) for caring about traffic:

Hence, the new lexicon of blogdom is all about traffic, not about ideas. Bloggers are into “tagging.” They are obsessed with “link bait.” A hot item is useless unless it can be linked and Drudgified. Any hack can blog items about all the young celebrities who are self-destructing. The first sentence, however, had better start with Lindsay Lohan climbing out of her limo without underwear.

I’m not sure why Bart continues to drone on like this––what good is he doing for his own image, not to mention that of his publication, by persisting to embody the cranky old man trying to shove the kids off his lawn? And by consistently dismissing blogging as masturbation, he’s shadily feigning ignorance on the very existence of the blog economy––an economy in which Variety is increasingly active. He couldn’t actually be reading blogs, right? He saw Perez Hilton on TV and it suddenly hit him that he hasn’t pumped this lever in almost two months, right? He’s so above the blogosphere, there’s no way he’s going to do a Technorati search on his own name and find this post…right?

Well, just in case, below the jump you (and he) will find a round-up of some of this week’s best non-Lindsay posts from around the blogosphere.

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