An interesting phenomenon in the blogosphere... Warning: major meta observations

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I have been reading a lot of social issues blogs (in the liberal vein and not on the A-list, intelligent right-wing blogs have yet to appear in number, and discussions on libertarian blogs -- note: I am a libertarian -- are already a bit rote) over the past two years on a variety of topics.

I have noticed that when like-minded bloggers discover each other and cross-blog over a period of time, they develop a deep, rich trove of facts that is distributed among their blogs and they have drawn conclusions beyond those held by the general public. This continues until they create altogether new concepts that generate their own fact finding, analysis and conclusions.

Excellent, but here is where the water gets muddy.

Do these bloggers try to educate others like blog visitors who leave comments or related blogs that have not yet entered their inner circle? Sometimes.

Or, do they use their new knowledge to club newbies over the head and attack related blogs for being so ignorant? Pretty much all the time.

Why would this be? Granted, newbie bashing is nothing new, but now I have seen so many examples of it, I think that now I can draw a conclusion or two. I believe that these bloggers have grown so close to their respective subjects that they assume everybody has drawn the same conclusions and formed the same new concepts. They are astonished when newbies ask to explain jargon that is concentrated in their circle. They give responses like, "Oh, we covered all that months ago." Puzzlement and disagreements get written off as ignorance, and time taken out to revisit old themes is considered to be time wasted.

The problem is that these circles reach a plateau in growth (regular visitors, participation by related blogs), decline, and sometimes fade away altogether. All that knowledge falls into the Google Blog pit as new bloggers come along and reinvent the wheel.