Blogging Restart

I've been blogging since 1999. I'm on my 4th blog or so; the first I built out of Notepad, ASP and html, the rest I've made with a few clicks at Blogger, Wordpress, and Typepad.

I was introduced to Typepad back in 2003 by Markos Zuniga and Jerome Armstrong. Markos and Jerome were the creators of Dean's Net Roots initiative, informed by Joe Trippi's view of a bi-directional campaign, where the campaign spoke and supporters spoke back.

Markos went on to create DailyKos.com, which is the most popular liberal blog with millions of visitors monthly, and Jerome created MyDD.com, which is not as popular but has its own value to it. They were pioneers, and I learned little from them if you judge from my own traffic.

I haven't aspired to be a well-known blogger. I'm not even sure why I do it. Maybe something I write will influence someone's thinking in a positive way. Maybe not. But I feel compelled to express thigns that come to mind that someone might find valuable.

Lately I've been blogging the negative, I feel, and I've gotten tired of that. I like to look at criticism as the optimism of dissent. Dissent does not come in a vaccum; it comes from a context of a vision for something better--at least in the dissenter's mind.

You complain about the convention center not so much because you hate convention centers, but because you feel there is a better Lancaster not well-served by such a concentration of energy, political will, and public dollars and credit.

You voice strong opposition to the bailout not because you feel banks should fail or that it's fundamentally wrong, but because it misses the point (there are better things we can do to fix the economy than provide a mere buffer for banks, for instance) and ignores the systemic problems and injustice inherent in our economic playing field.

So (after hundreds of posts) I'm going to try something new. Instead of the optimism of dissent, I'm just going to talk about the things that are already happening that reflect an optimistic vision, rather than the things that impede progress. This won't be a complete abandonment of complaints and dissent, but I'll try to stick with it.

So with that, I'm going to go enjoy a beautiful Fall's summer day.