So while I haven’t eliminated all the dead links, I think I should introduce you to some of the highlights of the updated blogroll so far. You’ll notice that some people who’ve helped my work find an audience are listed: David Sullivan (visit his photo site), Emory Rowland (Clickfire’s review of webhosts is comprehensive), Ario, Xiane (add her on twitter), Melinda, Opal, Mitchell Allen. There are more, of course. You’ll notice I’ve linked a bunch of tumblrs who have been very supportive of my work.

Other things to note on the blogroll:

• The Leading Tone is an awesome tumblr; it probably is the most engaging classical music blog I’ve seen. A side project of me and some friends is Classically Sound – the idea is to get everyone contributing something about classical music. That hasn’t happened yet, but I think it will. For now, I’m content to keep it updated.
• The journo blogs I’m reading regularly: McArdle, Cost, Weigel. Wish Kristine Lowe would blog more.
• UD artists: Carrie Baker, Francisco Vargas, Rachel Muldez and Mirka Hokkanen. You guys get one side of my school when I talk about a more conservative approach to learning. There is some awesome art produced there and I regret that I’m always playing catch-up to it.

There’s so much more, so many to thank, so many to promote. If you’re linked to me and want a link back, let me know. You make my job easier when you talk to me.

I realize this site is a mess in terms of organization. I also realize that I have quite a few entries which rant and make no sense. This blog is a continual work in progress.

A few posts I’m pretty proud of, with quotes from them:

• Skyrim and Political Philosophy – Like all political philosophy, the divide between political things and cosmology is problematic to say the least. The political things point to ever higher orders: underneath all the dogma is genuine wonder about what man himself is, where he belongs. But that doesn’t mean there’s any logical link between political things and cosmology.
• Maimonides, “Letter to Obadiah the Proselyte” – Milton speculated that at the end of time, there would not be any facing God, since God would be “all in all.”
• Nietzsche, “Thus Spake Zarathustra: On the New Idol” – With method, there is no such thing as theory in the older sense. There are only theories which have immediate practical use.
• Leo Strauss, “Memorial Remarks for Jason Aronson” – Socratic self-knowledge: Socrates knows exactly when he is to die (cf. Crito).
• Emily Dickinson, “I dwell in Possibility” – Possibility means choice – when you make a choice, other possibilities are closed to you.
• Xenophon, “Agesilaus” – It is true Xenophon describes philosophy in martial terms in some places: the boar in On Hunting is Being, and must be hunted with friends willing to shed both its and their own blood.

I do realize some of you might be here because you’ve seen my poetry. I’m a bit hesitant to link to that – that is very much a work in progress. “Enfolding” is the only one I share often without cringing. If you want to see my prose entirely on its own, divorced from a specific text, there’s a story about a trip I took to Iowa with choir to sing a wedding.

I’ll have a round-up of last year’s philosophy posts up soon.

In chronological order, starting from January:

• “Precipice,” Jill Alexander Essbaum – some people like to write poems that are a word or two per verse. This is a good example of that style.
• “It’s like the Light,” Emily Dickinson
• “Prince of Fire / Prince,” Jane Mead
• “Crocodile Tears,” Kay Ryan – highly recommended for those with little patience for poetry.
• “Modern City,” Eliza Griswold
• “So glad we are – a Stranger’d deem,” Emily Dickinson
• “We’re Building the Ship as We Sail It,” Kay Ryan
• “Object of Desire,” Dana Goodyear – this poem could use a lot more attention. One of the best reflections on man and nature I’ve encountered.
• “Photograph,” Marcin Świetlicki – I hope to be reading more of his work soon.
• “The difference between Despair And Fear,” Emily Dickinson
• “This is my letter to the World,” Emily Dickinson – an essential poem, not long at all, and I don’t think the commentary is half-bad.
• “The Moon,” Robert Bly – a reflection on where poetry emerges.
• “We knew not that we were to live,” Emily Dickinson
• “Take Comfort Where You Can,” Michael Chitwood – what use are our senses, again?
• “The Leaves like Women interchange,” Emily Dickinson
• “Doom is the House without the Door,” Emily Dickinson
• “Animal Caution,” Chase Twichell
• “Blue Laws,” Jean Monahan – one of the most powerful statements of “hard to get,” on my reading.
• “Linens,” Kay Ryan
• “No Prisoner be,” Emily Dickinson
• “Dark Morning: Snow,” Jane Kenyon – like all things Kenyon has written, powerful. “The Blue Bowl” is a personal favorite.
• “Taking Leave of a Friend,” Ezra Pound and Li Po
• “A nearness to Tremendousness,” Emily Dickinson
• “Confirming All who analyze,” Emily Dickinson
• “Best Things dwell out of Sight,” Emily Dickinson
• “One and One – are One,” Emily Dickinson
• “When the very last grief,” Vera Pavlova
• “Cloud,” Kay Ryan – masterful.
• “Superfluous were the Sun,” Emily Dickinson
• “First Things First,”  W.H. Auden
• “A Labyrinth of Open Space,” Ario Farin – everything Ario writes is excellent. This is no exception.
• “Did We abolish Frost,” Emily Dickinson
• “My Season’s furthest Flower,” Emily Dickinson – finds a way of attaching itself to nearly everything.
• “I knew that I had gained,” Emily Dickinson
• “Pinhole,” Kay Ryan
• “Spent,” Rae Armantrout
• “Satisfaction – is the Agent Of Satiety,” Emily Dickinson
• “The Bend,” Claude Esteban
• “Sonnet: Thoreau in Chernobyl,” Alison Croggon – incredible.
• “In West Virginia,” Maggie Glover – What do we learn from love lost?
• “Not so the infinite Relations,” Emily Dickinson

Both sets of views may not be entirely consistent. But I think a few actions have to be taken:

• Pulled off sitemeter because I don’t want to know my statistics anymore. I’ll more than likely approach 20,000 visitors this month and that’s good enough.

• Keep the focus on writing. Yeah, I’ve been more conversational recently. I have no regrets about this: I’ll get plenty on poetry and philosophy written soon.
• Focus on community. By far the trickiest thing. I need to get more people talking to each other on the fanpage and my actual facebook page and in the comments here. I don’t want it to be forced. I want this to be a place where people can feel free to be intelligent and not worry about what others say.
• Use different measureables. From here on out, it’s comments, facebook likes, tweets, reblogs, people responding on their blogs, e-mails, etc. Not that any of them actually tell the worth of a post. More like: that’s all we’ve got to go on, and they might not be worth measuring. They only tell what people are responding to. I don’t plan on writing the same post over and over to get a response.

The point of all this is to get the best possible audience, not just any audience. That a blog like this can prosper we know already. What’s next is up to us, literally.

That doesn’t mean Stumbleupon in its previous form was sustainable. It does need to compete on mobile devices. It does need some way of getting the more established parts of the Internet involved. Hence, a stripped down interface, an emphasis on the experience of stumbling (hitting a button and getting good random sites), and channels where celebrities and brands feature prominently. I’ll just say this: what is necessary is not always good.

The first thing that bugs me is the de-emphasis on the profile page. I get to tell a little bit about myself. No place for a URL, no “follow me on twitter,” no space to introduce why I use the service and what I might be able to contribute to the site or to others. Quite honestly, given how many people are using Facebook to meet people they’ve never met, one might think Stumbleupon might want to encourage a bit more connection among the userbase. I understand SU is not a social network. That doesn’t mean this isn’t insulting. Tumblr’s success isn’t just the ease of content-production. It’s also that if you want to be known there, that’s your right and option, and they encourage users to meet each other. Do people really want random sites thrown at them all the time?

Stumble seems to think that’s the primary service. There’s an algorithm and it gives people content to look at. This has to be the most ridiculous idea ever. The value of any service is what people get out of it.

Which brings up the primary question: what is the value to the user? Can I create a channel? I’m a small-time content producer. Nope, it looks like channels are restricted to the likes of CNN or The Atlantic. Which is funny, since last I checked, I can get that content elsewhere on the web.

Don’t get me wrong. The “explore” box is a great idea and gives SU a functionality that any massive collection of data needs. And yes, Stumbleupon definitely some degree of “curated content.” Not because the users were so terrible, but because any link I might share from Der Spiegel or The Atlantic was probably going to be utterly insignificant compared to pictures of lolcats. This isn’t an argument for elitism, but rather the diversity any site that is a service needs.

Again, the issue is what good the user gets out of a site. With Tumblr, easy content production and a large userbase eager to say hi are advantageous to anyone signing up. With Facebook, the fact one can sign up and immediately start friending nearly everyone known in the past and present can’t be taken for granted. I had one friend sign up and add something like 100 people he knew in a day. I don’t know how much people need a constant content stream from a button that throws random content at them. That was part of SU, sure. It was part of it because people wanted to see what other users found.

So again, thank you. I’m busy writing on Xenophon at the moment and the writing is going well (it does need some serious editing). The blog is obviously doing well. Where others create a space, I can work well and have a chance at being effective. But you guys create a “space,” not me. Without you, it’s a vacuum, not really space but nothingness. “Freedom” and “community” may not be concepts as divorced as we sometimes pretend they are.

I would really like it if some of the older entries got into the hands of the right people. I want more readers, but I’m aware they have to be the right sort, the ones that are excited to read heady stuff, think through it and share, not ones looking to make professional-sounding points over the same old, same old:

• Emily Dickinson, “I dwell in Possibility” – before the interviews, I thought this was a great way to introduce people to Dickinson & this blog. I still think that: it’s a poem that goes down easy, unless people just outright hate poetry.
• Xenophon, “Agesilaus” – the best response to “Why bother with Greek history?”
• Plutarch, “Pericles” – the best response to “Why bother with Greek thought about politics?”
• Maimonides, “Letter to Obadiah the Proselyte” – a strong contender for “most beautiful thing ever written.”
• Ashok Karra, “Enfolding” – I’ll write better poetry someday. Really.

I can’t wait until I can do more than just write. Sometimes I feel like I’m throwing messages in a bottle. It’s refreshing when it is crystal clear that is emphatically not the case.

What makes graffiti at its worst effective is the maintenance of a sentiment. We don’t care, there’s nothing else worth doing. It’s a tired, cliched form of protest. Blogging definitely creates echo chambers. The blogs that go “viral” tend to do so in established niches where challenging thoughts and opinions long ago disappeared. The “blogosphere” gets more mainstream attention from its anger, not its reason.

Yet one must wonder how a diversity of expression finds its way into one place. All of us have seen some stunning, beautiful examples of graffiti. I’m sure there’s graffiti that’s changed the world for the better.  Perhaps we should hope blogging is graffiti at its best. Sometimes writing can wait.

These entries will be marked by the use of the “epigraph” feature on my blog. A quote should stand high above the post itself, as in “like transparent glass” or “Beauty’s just another word I’m never certain how to spell.”

I will continue, of course, to create longer essays and more detailed commentary. I’m just thinking how nice it would be to have something out there that’s like a keepsake if done right. I’m still a long way from pulling that off, but we’ll see how this turns out over time.

Any ideas for quotes or thoughts I should cover are welcome.

I should say that I’m a bit confused as to what’s next. My feeling is that more traffic and publicity is not a bad thing, not at all. There’s a lot of substance in the Dickinson entries alone. I did promise a few people some entries on Nietzsche. Those will be coming soon, but not immediately. I have quite  a bit to write right now outside of the blog.

I feel guilty having all this traffic and not more substance, which is a ridiculous feeling. I have a whole commentary on Plato’s “Crito” on this blog. I guess what I’m thinking is this: with this amount of traffic, being known in a big way is inevitable. I’m not saying I’ll have a multimillion dollar wedding and a divorce two months later.  But I know people will be asking what they’re already asking in my e-mail, that much more – “tell me about grad school;” “explain Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus;” “here’s a conference on Dickinson you should attend,” etc. This might, on some small scale, be a form of celebrity. I’d like to be responsible.

When I think that, then I’m definitely sure getting the headier commentaries and poems from this blog to a wider audience is a good thing. There is good stuff on here. The way the humanities works is that we all read and work through texts together.

• Good blogs have some kind of personality. I’ve been doing this too long to argue otherwise. The information you give as a blogger can usually be had nearly everywhere else. People are coming to you because you are something different. Maybe you interact more with your audience, maybe you have unique tastes, maybe you have a personal situation that people want to hear more about.
• The really, really hard work isn’t joining a niche and finding a ready-made audience. The really, really hard work is laying the groundwork to make a niche sustainable. Someone said that my current traffic demonstrated that I must have profitable, popular topics. I burst out laughing. I don’t know how, but over time, we’re going to need to find a way to encourage people to stick it out with less than popular, profitable topics. If it doesn’t happen, media is worthless. The only thing that makes media truly worthwhile is the possibility it could aid independent thought. If we all think the same, that’s dangerous, to say the least.

Anyway, hope you enjoy the interview, and there are two others in case you want to read them: “Exclusive Interview: Ashok Karra” & “A Frank Interview with Ashok Karra.” There’s also this on blogging from a while ago: On Blogging, Having an Opinion, and the Quality and Trustworthiness of Your Voice