Sunday, May 29, 2005

This is the golden age of blogs

Exchanged emails with retired blogger Allah the other week. I'll not disclose the contents of our exchange, but it set me to thinking about where we are in this new, democratic wired era.

My thoughts on the nature and novelty of the blogosphere are not drastically different from any other enthusiast. However, even now I can smell the nostalgia coming. I miss Allah mightily(--though my no longer aching sides don't!), and the absence of heavyweights like Steven Den Beste and others still leaves a hole in the blog landscape, to me. Their absence is, in fact, one reason that I started this blog with its feeble little premise.

We are living through some kind of a golden age of this new media. The blogosphere circa 2000s will in time be regarded in the same way as we esteem Marvel comics in the 1960s, for example. Pop cultural greatness in a venue that no one thought to look for it. Just as classic movies and TV shows--hell, even 500 year old art masterpieces--are now viewable on videotape, DVD, streaming online video, and more media that were unimaginable to the original artists, so the best of the recent and current bloggage will one day be accessible in formats we don't yet have. Those departed bloggers, who left and took their creations with them, will live again in the nostalgia market, bathed in the affectionate glow of their once and future fans. So back up your files, A-double-lizzle; and wait out the present complications. Somehow, sometime, you're going to become another Sam Watterson or Gary Larson, whose art refused to follow them into retirement. And my Paypal click will be among the first in your inbox.