I have to continue poking away at and cleaning up links on this sight and in my rss reader that are not really worth my time.

I really hate to do this, but I have to stick with my gut. I like Bruce Schneier and his work. I think the world right now needs him; absolutely needs him. He is a necessarypundit. Ptacek put it well in predicting for 2007, “Schneier will not publish a single technical result this year, but I will read his blog anyways.”

I like his comments and his writing, and, as I said, the world needs him. But he basically keeps linking and saying the same things over and over. Yes, I know security is warped when it comes to the public and TSA. Yes, I know your commentors also have good responses and ideas. But I don’t need to read that every day or even every week. I really do get too much Schneier. I’m sure when he publishes very interesting things, I’ll hear about them from other places. (I also prefer his writing as opposed to short little posts that are just links elsewhere.)

I’m also currently evaluating the need for x number of IT/security analyst blogs. Quite honestly, analysts are quite a unique subsection of security bloggers:

– They tend to talk a lot and likely do very little. It is easy to make lists of best practices and give sage advice, but actually getting their practical advice into the reality of a business is a wholly different story.
– They tend to be right. All the time. If they speak it, you should believe it.
– They don’t typically reply on other people’s blogs. Instead, they reply on their own blogs to drive traffic back and forth between them.
– They are definitely a clique, where they all know each other, they all act like they’re friends, and they typically don’t listen to many people outside of that clique.
– Far too often they speak the obvious, make predictions that mean nothing right now, or repeat what others say (often within the clique).
– Have I mentioned that they rarely actually *do* things?

Yeah, I’m being pretty harsh and maybe a little bitter, but for me it all gets back to how I want to spend my time with blogs and research. Do I want to see the “Analyst Clique” repeat itself and argue with itself and pat itself constantly on the back in 5 places each day? Not really. I’m sure if I eliminated x-2 of the “Analyst Clique” blogs from my list, I’d still get all the important info linked back from those 2 I leave up, plus their commentary. Hopefully I can go through and remove some links this weekend. The hard part will be choosing one or two, because, despite my bitterness above, they all seem to write well, think well, and have some thought-provoking words here and there.