The local Buddha on a blog anniversary

by Steve, February 6th, 2011

The giant Asurindarahu wanted to see the Buddha, but was reluctant to bow before him. The Buddha, while lying down, presented himself as much larger than the giant. He then showed him the realm of heaven with heavenly figures all larger than the giant. After all this, Asurindarahu, the giant, was humbled, and made his obeisance to the Buddha before leaving.

This month marks the 5th anniversary of this blog, and the sixth anniversary of Wacky Mommy. We started Internet publishing back in 1997 with a little-known literary arts magazine, before anybody had heard of “blogs” and when Mark Zuckerberg was 12 years old. Around 1999, we started another site that morphed into something blog-like after veering through a number of different styles, and in 2005, when blogs were just taking hold, we started writing and hosting our own. In 2008, we started an influential public policy news and opinion site which we ran for two years in our spare time.

Now that Zuckerberg owns the Internet and all your personal data, to be sold on the free market to advertisers, blog traffic is way off. Many, many people don’t venture outside of the walled garden of Facebook… unless there is a link posted there.

Who remembers RSS feeds and readers? (I do!)

The thing is, this technology still works great, and there is great potential yet to be realized. We shelved our New Media networked journalism meta project almost a year ago, but now we’re thinking of dusting it off.

Now, here I go to link this post on Facebook.