Thursday, October 18, 2007

Post One Thousand

According to the little counter on my posting page, this is the 1000th post on this blog.

Shocking, really. One thousand posts, ranging from rants to memes to snark to desperate attempts to explain how things work and how things SHOULD work. Stuff that wanders all over the place. Collectible quarters. Local politics. Theater. You know, stuff.

And in the four years since the inception of this little operation, I've seen the entire forest of the blogosphere shoot up around me. Bloggers have gone from little hobbyists of the old HAM radio set to movers and shakers. Bloggers are quasi-journalists with apparently some (but not all) first amendment protections. Huge political and promotional blogs have grown up, dominating the landscape. Newspapers no longer are the first draft of history - rather it is someone on the scene with a cell phone and internet access. And people are actually making money on these things.

Not me, though. In fact, whenever I read one of those "Things you can do to make your blog more popular" articles, I inevitably find that I do NONE of these things. No multiple posters. No comment section (I rarely find any that are not either too flattering or overrun with trolls - you want to contact me, the address is in the upper right of this page). No cross-promotions. No impressive graphics. No on-line ads.

Instead its just a small blog, part of the "long tail" of the blogosphere. Even the tech has moved on, with the personality of blogs being replaced by the myspaces and facebooks, which thrive on their visual components as opposed to honestly having to write. So I go easily from leading edge to backwater.

And I'm pretty cool with it. In fact, I have been thinking about all the things that I still mean to be posting, even after a thousand times up at bat. I want to write more about imaginary states like Jefferson and the UP. I want to dig into the big pile of books I've been meaning to talk about. I want to talk about comics a bit more. I want to visit the various Fantasy Worlds I've been a part of over the years. I still have season tickets at the REP. And I want to finish up the collectible quarters.

But for the moment, I want to write about local politics, since we have an election coming up.

More on that, as I always say, later.