honesty and loyalty.

As someone who often blogs three times a day, I can say that the people who respond to my blogs at least once in a while are the people I consider my friends. Others are probably friend-collectors or de facto ex-Tribesters or people I invited into my network just because I thought they made for nice eye candy, or something equally shallow and/or inconsequential.

"Bad"? <shrug> Probably not "bad"--what good does such a judgment serve, anyway? I'd be more inclined to refer to the depth of the friendship rather than the goodness of it.

Perhaps it simply makes you a less intimate friend, which isn't necessarily a bad thing... unless, perhaps, you're invested in a self-image as a more intimate friend, or have led someone to believe that you are more available to them then you wind up proving to be.

But even that, it seems to me, isn't so much about goodness or badness as much as it is about reality-checks.

My claim is that busy blogs don't "overshadow" little-used blogs unless one lets them pile up, or, as was the case with me for most of last year, one's software or dial-up connection makes it a challenge to read friends' blogs at all.

If it's laziness or apathy that causes us to miss seldom-posted blogs, then it seems to me that that would be a good reality-check on the depth of one's investment into one's Tribe friendships: does frequency of blogging determine the quality of a friendship?

But even "bad" friends--friends who intentionally present themselves as something they're not--aren't even necessarily bad on purpose; I remember reading an engaging essay once on the topic that "A Jerk Doesn't See Himself As Others Do." A "bad" friend may be more clueless than malicious...