There’s always something to howl about.

Life as a big, unchained hound in a big, unchained world…

I don’t give a rat’s ass about traffic, but I care a great deal about being as big as we are.

It looks like those new Technorati numbers are going to hold, and that particular screenshot sings to me. We’re not as big as the real estate porn blogs or the bubble blogs or the investor blogs, but we are far and away the biggest of the category I call the RE.net, the real estate industry weblogs.

My delight is not a matter of traffic or links, that’s just so much shoes on the carpet. What matters to me is not where we are but, rather, how we got here.

In email today a friend of BloodhoundBlog said:

I love it that you’ve done this, but I love it most because you’ve done it without the Twitterati, despite people making public pronouncements that they are boycotting BHB, by bowing to no one, by keeping your own counsel.

And that’s exactly right. I don’t care if nobody is listening, so long as we’re doing this work our way.

But consider: Hardly anybody bothers me, these days, with bad advice on what and how to write or how to manage this weblog, but this used to be a common thing. But we are what we are despite all that bad advice.

I know there are a certain number of people reading here — even if they have insisted publicly that they don’t — who don’t understand what we are doing at all. There are a small few who understand all too well — and it drives them completely crazy. Another small few get it and love it and catch every delightful little nuance of the theater of the thing. But the ninety-and-nine — and I never forget the ninety-and-nine — are here for their own reasons, and a healthy self-interest is the perfect expression of the unchained ideal.

I know that you are confronted all the time with what I consider to be horribly bad advice — kiss up, kiss ass, bend, yield, compromise, to get along you’ve got to go along. Of all the many things we can do at BloodhoundBlog, perhaps the most significant is that we can serve as a living, breathing counter-example to all of that swill.

We bend to no one. We bow to no one. We take shit from no one. But we’re the best. And because we’re the best, we’re the biggest.

If that little victory dance irritates you, I’m genuinely sorry for you. I wish you had better values. It is delights you, I love your spirit and I want to do everything I can to help you cultivate it. And if your impulse is to say, “Cut the crap and let’s get back to business” — you’re my kind of hard-working dog…