Yet Lileks is not too put off:
Speaking of which: If blogs are dying I suppose I shall go with them, he said, using “shall” to put you in mind of someone tossing a scarf over his shoulder and facing the bracing wind. There’s been a few stories here and there about the expiration of the form, occasioned perhaps by Andrew Sullivan stepping away, and noting how everything is going Social and Sharable. I’ve thought of adding social buttons to the bottom of the post again, but it would make more sense to add them to individual pages so people could share links to whatever caught their fancy. There are thousands of pages.
So no.
Am I worried about time and trends passing me by? Not at all. This has always been just what it is since the very first entry, and while it’s expanded in length and subject, I am not going to convert it to a series of sharable snacks for Facebook feeds. Perhaps that’s unwise. But I hate Facebook and have no desire to spend any time there, so tailoring the Bleat or lileks.com for Zuckerberg’s dull blue borg cube would be like spending a lot of time and money getting fitted for clothes I don’t like so I can blend in amongst people I don’t know in a country I don’t like.
I'm on Facebook but I just don't use it. It's merely the required option to be found in this age.
Lileks likes Twitter. I'm neutral-ish on it. I've pondered using Twitter. Sometimes I make really short posts to see how that feels.
But like Lileks, this site is about me and not about you. Oh, I hope you get good information out of my writings. But the reason for this blog is that I like to explain stuff.
To my surprise, I enjoyed my limited teaching time (intro US history in community college) far more than I expected. And my main job was, at the heart of it, explaining stuff.
And I didn't see the media doing a very good job--with rare exceptions--of explaining the war we embarked on after we were hit on September 11, 2001. I believed (and still believe) our war effort deserves our public's support. I gave the media until July 2002 to demonstrate any kind of learning curve at all on reporting on war, and they failed. So here I am still.
So there will never be comments here any more than there are in a book you read. Email me if you must. Mock me (or praise me) on your own site if you like. Have a ball. That is your right.
I'll probably join Twitter just when a new service that sends a sense of your emotions directly to your frontal lobe to spare you the effort of reading 140 characters becomes popular.
Our ancestors built this world wide web. If the Tweets and social network posts and pictures blot out the sun, and if they descend on me to destroy this blog, then I shall blog in the shade until that day.
And the Spartans wore even less than pajamas! How can I endure less?
Especially when Lileks will be right there at the front of the phalanx, hacking the social media foes like the annoying Immortals they are, while I remain in the fifth rank trying to poke somebody with the sharp thing.
Although I admit that it would be nice to have 300 unique visitors per day.
UPDATE: It is looking like we lost one blogger. Mad Minerva has been silent since January 8th. And it has been a while since she blogged on Taiwan matters, which got me to follow her blog. And her email is no longer working, it seems.
Perhaps she was absorbed into the higher ed borg collective and is now eagerly watching MSNBC. Pity.
Hopefully all is well and a better life has taken priority over mere blogging!
