Future Blogs

Hi! I'm back! That moment of silence lasted over a year, didn't it? I just wasn't ready I guess. Seems the blogosphere has changed since those first tentative efforts. For one thing, the word 'blogosphere' exists now. For another, everyone wants to make money on it now. How? Advertising, of course. Cool. So I get to be the viral vector hanging ad sheets on your virtual doorknob instead of the usual bulk e-mails. I reckon my canned ham is better than that spam. Of course the blogs getting the most traffic are the ones talking about blogging itself, as if newspaper columnists might be commenting on the future of editorializing, or appropriate lengths and widths of columns, or circulation estimates, or maybe the cost of Mississippi pulpwood. They don't, of course. They talk about politics and religion and social issues and entertainment. But the blogosphere is still that wild wild West where anyone with a gun and guts has got a job, ultimate payoff at the end of the trail. Chaos slowly but inexorably organizes itself and the true professionals will rise to the surface as they must if the medium is to survive and thrive as more than yellow journalism or a mutual admiration society of conspiracy buffs or post-grad jornalistas hesitant to get a 'real job'. For now the medium is neither rare nor especially well done, and alarms bells go off when the saying 'it must be true; I read it on the Internet' becomes de rigeur sarcasm.

Drink deep. The medium is no longer the message. The message is the message. Before diving back in, I researched to see who was doing what with blogs to see where I might make a contribution. Now my main blogging interests are travel, Thailand, and music, especially world music, and I expected them to be fairly equally blogged. I was wrong. Music is weak, as if writing and music were mutually exclusive activities. Travel is off the charts, with probably more blogging networks than music has individual blogs. These may be largely temporary, of course, as travelers blog their trip and then go back to 'real life', happy to have blogged 'for free' while earning ad revenue for their sponsors and filling hotel rooms and tour vans for their advertisers. Thailand had quite a few, quite natural considering the trials and tribulations of expatriation and the need to establish contacts beyond one's neighborhood to find acquaintances with mutual interests. This may be the Net's saving grace actually, for though it may not foster up-front social skills and may create a few more Nerds than might otherwise be the case, at least now those Nerds have a place to go for mutual succor and enlightenment, and the school quarterback may the odd man out now. The real surprise is the number and quality of scientific blogs, giving the lie to those who think that the Internet is only for losers and social misfits incapable of talking to a real live girl, or about much of anything else except the Net itself.

Me, I just want to write. I got my poetic license and I want to write. I've done the research and the groundwork, connected with Google, Adsense, andFeedburner, got Pay Per Post, Linkworth, and Technorati on the back burner, even learned a little HTML, and now I just want to write. If I was burned out a year ago after countless poems, screenplays, and novels, all 'in turnaround', now I'm not. Now my brain is atrophying from lack of stimulation. Of course most people don't come to Thailand for intellectual stimulation, but I do. Unless you've got a university gig, then the only way to pursue intellectual interests is to simply allow yourself the time and economic space to do so. No, this is not an ex-pat blog with typical thinly researched cultural conclusions masquerading as matters of world importance, nor the worldly concerns of visas and entry requirements, though Thailand certainly has plenty of those at the moment. Nor will I issue opinions on how to deal with your Thai wife, and certainly nothing of ladyboys, demimondaines, courtesans, and farangs, though my wife assures me that this is what people really want. Of course my wife watches Thai soap operas as if they were the true path of Buddhist enlightenment, so... okay, maybe a little of that, but only in the abstract. The pleasure centers do reside in consciousness, right?

This will be a travel blog, of a sort, in space and in time. I do have thirty years experience, so any revisits will be a comparison with what it was like before as much as a comparison with what it's like in the US or elsewhere. How can you do a full-time travel blog, you ask? Easy. Practice. Seems the older I get the more feverish the travel bug, as if it could all come to a precipitous end. Uh huh. This year alone I've been to the Brazilian coast, Guatemala (after many years), Cambodia, and the Canadian provinces of Alberta and the North West Territories, not to mention my home base and safe havens of Thailand, US, and Mexico. Last year I was in Alaska, South America, Spain, Morocco, and the Canaries. Next year Mali and Iceland are on the agenda for January, same trip, so you get the idea. Frivolous frolics, you say, only for the idle and wealthy? Hardly, since I'm neither. Much occurs in the way of research for my world music interests, and the rest is kill-time while waiting for US projects to bear fruit. Anyway, all my travel and costs of living in Thailand certainly add up to no more than what it would cost to live in the US full time, far less Europe, so why not? Yeah, you know. It's a way of life. Please stay tuned. When I'm not traveling, I'll do the ex-pat thing, and when I've got nothing better, I'll include excerpts from my book Rivers of Consciousness. Of course the best trips can only be told in past tense anyway, since the real outback has few, if any, Internet connections, and hardly the time for it. Actually, what I'd really like to do is maybe write the first Internet book about the Internet, kinda' like Kramer's coffee tables, and for those without Internet or maybe with extra bucks, it might even come in the form of a cheapo little laptop or something. Yeah, I like that, so stay tuned. Welcome to my nervous system.
p.s. I'll leave the old stuff on, for now at least, sorta' like junk DNA, the kind in your double helices, not your bedsheets, just so you'll know where I'm coming from.