New post from Murph and Freeacre. An appeal.

A SMALL PART OF THE FUTURE

I have been sitting in front of my keyboard for some time now trying to decide how to approach this subject. So far I can’t come up with some clever introduction, so I’m just going to jump into it.

The subject today is this blog. It appears to me that we are at some kind of intersection, decision point, whatever we want to call it. Something is about to change. First, a bit of history and my perspective.

This blog has been in existence since November 2005. What started out by Cyclone as a political exposure and commentary on political happenings at the time has morphed into a lot more than that. Our discussions have wandered all over the place. The blog has, overall, attracted few continuous readers, but the ones that do frequent this site have formed some interesting bonds. We are continuously sharing information and personal perspectives on a wide range of subjects. I know that for Freeacre and myself, a significant amount of time every day is spent either reading what has been written at the site, following links from comments, doing some of our own nosing around to contribute to a particular subject, and of course periodically writing posts, and this doesn’t include the time spent with emails back and forth with the regular readers. Both Freeacre and I have commented on several occasions that we consider this site unique and having value to both of us and I surmise, for you reading this also. In the last year, Cyclone has had (for what I understand is a variety of reasons) less and less time to devote to the site. I suspect this situation is not going to change any time soon.

I expect that in the next year, you are going to see a lot of sites that are devoted to commentaries somewhat similar to Cyclones site fold up and go away. This is going to be the result of several factors; Burn out by the authors, Government intervention, Changing circumstances by the blog initiators, lack of readers, the list can be quite extensive. It is the same for why blogs are started, a whole variety of reasons. I do expect the government to get more involved in web sites that are critical of the government. How this will be manifested is open to speculation. So, in reality, sites critical of the shenanigans of elected and unelected officials I expect to be taken down under duress.

So, here is our particular situation. Neither Freeacre nor myself are prolific enough writers to keep even a post a week going, and even if we did, being critical of the government might bring the wrath of Homeland Security down on us, force the site to register as a lobby, or any other sort of limiting regulation since of course we would be contributing the perception that your either for us or for the world wide terrorists, which of course is not the case, but we aren’t dealing with people who take criticism easily. A classic tautology. So we might just have this to deal with somewhere in the future, with or without Cyclone’s contribution.

Which means that to have something meaningful and timely, there is by necessity, going to have to be contributing writers for the site besides Freeacre and Murph, and on a steady basis. If we don’t have fairly steady input, it is going to get pretty clumsy in the comments. If in a week, we have 40-70 comments, how many would there be in 2-3 weeks of the same post. We start having much over 70 or so comments, there is going to be a lot of wading around in old material that for sure is not going to attract new readers and will make further comment contribution clumsy. I am sure many of you have been to sites where they have significantly more than a 100 comments, it becomes very difficult to go through all of them, and then to add more thought on a subject. There are other formats that would make that more viable, but I have no idea how to do that, and I suspect that it would cost money, and that, I sure am not in a position to deal with anyway. I have been to forums as part of a site that may have over 1000 comments but they are catalogued

So, from all of this above, I conclude that to keep things moving at a sustainable pace and keep interest going, there is gong to have to be several more contributing writers that are able to write in a manner that is fairly consistent with how we have been doing it to this point. We are going to need reasonable documentation, (not necessarily exhaustive research) for assertions, reasonably stated positions and thoughtful analysis. I know that Freeacre and I do not have contacts outside of the web that can validate information I would present for most subjects that deal with the government. Cyclone had those kinds of contacts. So what we would be doing is summarizing a lot of what we researched on the web.

For myself, I have contributed about 50 posts to the site. I find that except for spurious moments, I am running out of new information to present for discussion, running out of fresh perspectives on situations, events and concepts. You cannot imagine the admiration I have for the writers that can continue to do this on a steady basis, for very long periods of time.

We are at another turning point. Some decisions need to be made, and because of the nature of the steady readers on this site, I think it needs to be taken up at a council fire. Aho.

Okay, now it’s My Two Cents…

Freeacre

Our venerable leader, Cyclone, has contacted us and told us this morning that he is sick once again and also swamped with work from his two jobs, both of which take him out of town. He is planning to purchase a lap top computer so that he can contribute to the blogsite from wherever his jobs take him as he has time. But, he’s not going to have much time. He’s asked us to appeal to all of us regulars to keep the site going.

So, that’s what we are doing. Murph and I will contribute posts as they occur to us and for which we have the wherewithal. But, we need your help if we are to post things regularly enough to keep the site viable and interesting.

A friend of mine sent me an e-mail message with a quote from Bill Moyers:

"I mean, think about it. Other than the war
in Iraq, the Katrina disaster, the deficit, the
CIA leak, torture, stopping stem cell research,
homeland security, global warming and
undercutting science, we've yet to really feel
the negative effects of the Bush administration."
-- Bill Moyers

These are the Ides of March. It’s still a very pivotal period with lots of implications for our country and our selves. I know that I have come to rely on this site and its people for emotional support as well as information with which to prepare and come to terms with events. I would like to see it continue as long as it serves us or as long as it can be maintained.

So, the question is: what do you think? And, would you contribute to posting to help keep it going?

That’s it, My Friends. We are looking forward to your thoughts.

aho