The Place-Holder

Hi. If you're reading this, I am dead. No, just kidding. If you're reading this, it means you can read, and it probably means you've got nothing better to do. Or maybe you're avoiding the housework. Like me. I was half-way through the washing up, and thought, "Hey, why don't I start another blog. Right now!"

The reason for this is I'm actually going to start withdrawing from my hereto reasonably active electronic life. In a couple of weeks I'll be shutting down my FaceBook profile (or at least minimising it - haven't quite decided yet, but I'm lening toward the cold turkey approach), and similarly in a couple of weeks Ning is going to dstart charging for service. I co-edit a fledgling discussion group called The Conversation on Ning, which began here as a weblog on Blogger. Now I'm going to be bringing it back home.

I have my reasons for this withdrawl, and later on I'll probably go into some of them. Now, while I'm abandoning the social part of the social web, I don't want to abanndon the good folk I've met over the years. This blog will be for them. If anyone is truly interested in what I've got to say, they can come here, leave me comments, check out the other blogs, and generally have a good time with as much or as litttle of online me as they like.

As I said, I'm going to reintroduce The Conversation as a blog. I'm also going to try to revive another blog project, Moby and Me. Moby and Me was a twice failed project involving me reading Moby Dick and recording my thoughts about what I read on a chapter-by-chapter basis. It was doomed to fail (twice) because I don't think I approached it with the right level of irreverance. I was an English major of the "close reading"tradition, and Moby Dick is a book that begs the reader to have fun with it (besides, I'm not an academic - if I'm not getting paid for it, why should I be thinking so hard?). Third time's a charm, right?

So this is a palce-holder and declaration of intent. The good folks at Google are willing to let me do this for free, for which I'm very grateful. Keep an eye out for more content on all three blogs, and in the mean time, take care, pat a dog or cat or rabbit or something, email someone you haven't said "Hi" to in a while, and generally try conecting with someone in a more meaningful way then "poking" or giving their status-update a thumbs up.

Now, back to the dirty dishes.