Just to make Mybloglog happy ... :)

[The Abyss / Joseph Dunphy]

A post to put something into the feed, so I can be sure that the feed
is feeding over there.

This group and account are associated with my social bookmarking
activities, which usually involve a large amount of critical
commentary and my going off on (what I hope will be interesting)
tangents; the sort of after-the-fact commentary with which the word
"criticism" was once almost synonomous.

If you want to hear about new knols and other pages I've created or
updated on Google, associated with the Abyss (my Stumbleupon blog),
you should join the Mybloglog community for this group. I don't expect
many people to do that, at first, because there isn't much to see at
this point, but if you do eventually find yourself liking what you
see, and decide that you'd like to see more of it, your decision to
join that community might bring you an added benefit.

I write with the hope that I'll eventually be read. When I see your
name on that list of subscribers, that tells me that here is another
person who is interested in what I am doing, and that encourages me to
do a little more of it. You might notice that I've started a number of
projects. While all of these are going to get fleshed out into real
sites - and that means an absolute minimum of 50 pages worth of
content each, and probably over 100 - I couldn't possibly find enough
hours in the day to be active on all of those sites with any kind of
regularity. Yes, that thought has occured to me.

Think of the various sites I've created being in a kind of Darwinian
struggle with each other. On each, I will try a different approach to
creating my blog and homepage, no two approaches being built around
exactly the same subject matter. Those pages and blogs that attract
the most attention, as measured by subscriptions and inbound links
(and the most positive buzz), will almost certainly end up being the
ones that I attend to regularly, the others being mothballed, seeing
only very infrequent updates. They're on free servers, so I probably
won't delete them - what would be the point to that? - but there won't
be a lot more to see on them.

One other point - that any of the sites will make the cut is not a
given. At the end of a lot of work, I might very well find myself
concluding that I have no appreciable readership. If so, then at some
point I'll simply start treating my blogs as writing exercises, and
mothball all of them in the manner described above, and why not? Just
by indicating their interest, people give me constructive feedback,
and that's valuable. Without it, just writing purely for myself, as
some would urge me to do, I won't grow as a writer and my style will
probably become a parody of itself. On these terms, I will no longer
find posting on the Internet to be a helpful experience, and certainly
it can become a major source of aggravation.

Not all sites are in the running, no matter how the vote goes.
Anything you see me write about Internet drama is written for only one
reason - rumor control. Yes, I know that some people enjoy reading
this stuff, but in the case of one of my better known past enemies,
the guy has been dead for years, now, and I'm giving serious thought
to deleting all pages relating to him, and just letting to poor crazy
old man rest in peace. In the case of the living - I might finish a
fight, but I'm never the one who starts it, or keeps it going. If I
can be convinced that the rumor mill has finally, completely been shut
down, and there's nothing more to rebut, then I'll be happy to get rid
of any content relating to this squabble or that. Writing about such
things is not what I came online to do.

Nor are all ideas ones that I'm willing to explore, should they be
suggested, no matter how popular they might be. I'm sure that I could
get a lot of readership by posting porn, or writing about celebrity
gossip, but I wouldn't feel good about that kind of success. Interest
on the part of the reader is needed, but it is not enough. I have to
believe in what I'm doing, and have fun doing it, or what's the point?
Yes, life is full of compromises, but this activity is not putting
food on my table, or even providing me with the funds needed to buy a
ride on the CTA. It is purely an avocation.

If what you see is creative or scholarly in nature, even in the most
amateurish sense, then that blog or site is one that I'm considering
for long term activity, and increasingly, the Abyss will fall into
that category. You might notice that the posts about the stumbletrolls
are already gone. Those about the various web services will soon start
being phased out as well, being relocated to another blog I'm writing,
specifically devoted to that kind of review and discussion. What will
remain will be a discussion of pages I've found about art, science,
photography, philosophy and maybe a few about cooking and travel, with
a continuing themes of simplicity, austerity and restraint, informed
by a sort of minimalist aesthetic that you should see in my own
original illustrations.

At the very least, 50 pages will be needed for the Abyss to define
itself. If, after 100 pages, you want it to define itself a little
more, you know how to make that happen.

[The Abyss / Joseph Dunphy]

For further updates ...

http://groups.google.com/group/the_abyss/web/opening