I set up this blog about a year and change ago. My thinking about it was the same as when I set up my first blog back in around 2005. Back then, I had started doing some things that got media attention, and I wanted to have more agency about my own story from my own perspective. It worked, and for a good ten years I fed “tasty morsels of thought” into Dan’s Diner.

It is now about 11 years after I stopped that first blog. I can’t even remember the reasons I stopped, but there were several.

• Social media, which at the time was dominated by Twitter and Facebook, had taken the wind out of the sails of blogs.

• Attention and engagement through comments seemed to take precedence over thinking and writing and constructing good sentences that took more than 130 characters to express.

• And with hindsight, I now also think that the algorithms that govern who gets seen and heard and promoted or ignored were starting to take over — for good or for worse.

I seem to remember that my old WordPress blog had also been hacked and I lost access to the database. I do have a copy of the old posts somewhere — but does anyone care about that now? Is it even relevant? The fact that I even have to ask that question in a BLOG no less says everything. Yes, nobody cares except “history” which would be the responsibility of people alive long after all of us are dust in the wind.

I remember back then that my then-toddler Loren was sitting in their high chair at dinner. I must have been talking about the Blogosphere and how it was revolutionizing the media ecosystem. Then, out of nowhere, Loren spoke up:

”Blog, blog, blog, blog, blog” they spurted. Followed by, “All you talk about is blogs!”

And you know, she was right. I was probably obsessing too much about blogs, as I now still obsess about other new trends. And I add the “Bloggity Blog” to the title of this post for obvious Monty Python reasons.

And yet here I am again all these years later (19 years in fact!) posting random stuff on a blog. Why? Oh yeah — now I remember. It’s precisely because I can say whatever I want to in my own voice, from my perspective, for those who actually care to hear it. And it is not filtered by an algorithm, and is not serving the interests of a data broker or ad company who paid for my personal data. But just for the record, if anyone out there is interested in paying me for data, my price is exactly $500,000. Get in touch 🙂 As a published author, I already have done that without even asking for it, and for almost no remuneration whatsoever.

Thank you for reading this far. Unless you are AI, in which case I will direct you to the end of the first paragraph. I WILL gladly accept payment to train you.