Why I want you to read this blog

I'm going to ask you to indulge me for just a minute. 

Actually, I'm going to ask you to indulge me for just a minute, a couple times of week, for the foreseeable future. 

I'm asking you to read this blog. Blogging, which was for a brief moment a prime means for people to keep in touch, seems of late to have been mostly displaced by social networking, especially Facebook, which allows for more robust content than the ultra-concise Twitter. 

I've thought about leaving Facebook, especially given its increasingly worrisome ambitions. I'm not sure I want Facebook to become a general-purpose portal for digital content. I'm quite certain I don't want it to become a geo-political entity "on par with nations." Still, at this point choosing to exit Facebook seems like choosing to stop listening to my friends, colleagues and neighbors. Like ignoring their lives in a profoundly anti-social way. No, until such a time as we can migrate the network somewhere else, Facebook seems to be an evil we're stuck with. 

Still, there is something about the Facebook composition experience that leaves me feeling like something is missing. Something we had back in the moment of personal blogging. We seem to have lost the space of our own that blogs once provided. A space in between the more formal and controlled writing of published work (including work published on higher-profile, edited group blogs) and the constant rolling present of the social network. A space where a draft of a thought too big to fit in an update status can be hashed out over the course of a day. A space we control, and thus can navigate and retrieve thoughts from the archive more readily. 

Of course, we haven't really lost this space. This blog has still been here, unused, all these years. What we've lost are readers coming to the space. I can link to my blog, but doing that is asking an indulgence. Leave the stream of the rolling now for a few minutes and come pay attention just to me! Just dropping the link in the stream isn't enough to compel anybody to click on it (my Google analytics suggest).

So, I'm asking that indulgence, dear reader. Click the link. I could just keep posting stuff here and dropping links and hoping for the best, but writing is hard when you know no one is reading. Help me out. 

Here's what I'll promise you in return. If and when you revive your old blog, and start dropping links into the rolling present, I'll click on them :-)