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Happy Blogiversary to me

Hey, Google thinks blogiversary is a word, who am I to argue?

12frogs is six today. Which may be why Andrew Hinton’s recent Poor old blog post struck a chord with me:

It was such a big deal just not long ago, but now here they are, blogs, sitting around watching other, younger, nimbler channels giddily running around their feet without a care in the world. The Twitters, Jaikus, Facebook apps. The Dopplrs, Flickrs and the rest.

It’s like somebody took a hammer to the idea of “blog” and it exploded, skittering into a million bits, like mercury.

Which, really, isn’t a bad thing. I played around with stream aggregator Profilactic today — it makes what it calls a mashup from all the different things you feed it — and the most interesting part was actually pulling together the list of URLs where “my stuff” can be found online. The interface was pretty slick, and sure enough, it took the nearly dozen bits I gave it and turned it into a perfectly reasonable web page streaming my content.

Thing is, the flickr photos were medium-sized, and I really wanted them to be small. I poked around some, but there doesn’t seem to be a way to change this. No way to customize the CSS, either. I suppose wanting to do stuff like that is why I have my own blogs: so I can do what I want. Which is, again, why I liked the post on inkblurt.

I don’t know. All I know right now is, there’s my blog. With its complete sentences, its barely-touched comment threads. Its antiquated notion of being at a domain-named location. Its precious permalinks & dated archives, like it’s some kind of newspaper scholars will scan on microfiche in future generations.

Most six year olds aren’t long in the tooth, they’re what, in kindergarten? First grade? I like that idea much better. Well, not in the school lunch tray sense of the word. Really, there was nothing attractive about that. Or the round turquoise plastic attached to the tables seats in the lunch room. I mean in the unlimited play and imagination sense, in the get in trouble for the misuse of art supplies sense.

I hope I’ll have that — okay, get a bit of that back — next month, when I’m doing NaBloPoMo. Either way, you’ll be hearing all about it. From this very domain-named location.

Congrats! I didn’t realize you’d been around so long. Six years is quite the accomplishment.

Thanks for linking to my tongue-in-cheek missive. I was mainly feeling that sense of overwhelm from having *so many* venues for self-expression, and wondering when I’d have the discipline to sit down and write a whole paragraph for a blog post again. Of course, it does come back — and blogs are certainly not *really* obsolete, it’s just getting to the point where it’s hard to say where one genre of online writing ends and another begins, no? Cheers!