…claims there are now eight million Americans regularly making “blogs” and similar personal websites.

If true, it means my once-lonely pursuit now has a lot of company; albeit often-isolated company.

When I began this site a decade ago, it was an extension of a newspaper column that I’d been writing in monthly, then weekly formats for nine years. As you can tell from the archive pages here, my range of subjects, styles, and lengths has remained fairly consistent from then to now. The biggest difference is I’m writing and posting one item at a time, instead of in batches.

I make no claims to have invented this form. At the start, I was copping the formula of the “three dot” newspaper column, one of the most dynamic and flexible literary formats America had ever generated. Now, an alleged 2.6 percent of the entire US population has taken up this art form, for varying reasons and in varying styles.

And to imagine–when I started the site, I thought it would be “unique” enough to generate a full-time income from banner ads. Apparently I, too, was caught up in the dot-com hubris of the era, even while I openly scoffed at it.