forums and blogs

I used to be a lousy host, now I'm a lousy blogger.

> I think blogs as well as forums may soon be on the way out as there can't be much money in them either.

I don't know what will be in ten years, but for now I think blogs are here to stay. Blogs, in my uninformed opinion, don't pose the kind of problems on the software side that forums pose.

And everything that Google did and does, doesn't bring money directly, but indirectly. It's their business model.

The formatting in blog posts drives me crazy (among other things). Like, I copied in the above quote and it also copies in the format and I don't know how to get rid of it.

So can anybody still get into Worldcrossing and post there? Because I can't. I'm just glad that I failed to extend my yellow star subscriptionfor Worldcrossing in June.

What I was considering is to turn this blog more into a forum-like thingie by adding other authors to the author list.

Forum history of the day:. The INTERNATIONAL FORUM that I started in Worldcrossing in April 2001 grew out of Salon Table Talks International Issues folder. Hobbes and Blue aka Mentally Bereft collaborated in 2003 or 2004 to preserve the archive of this forum.

In the first two months of the INTERNATIONAL FORUM (IF) there were around a dozen hosts in the IF, among them most memorably for me Hobbes, Sukey, Claude, Wizdumb and Ruth. In June 2001 there was a schism, when Alex aka khaval alazman started the RANDOM INTERNATIONAL and drew Mod Sukey, Davenhill and Mod Lang among others on her side. For me that was a bit painful, because next to Ruth there was no one at Table Talk's International Issues there was no one that was as fun to flirt with as Alex. The ownership of RANDOM INTERNATIONAL shifted various times in the last seven years.

While RANDOM INTERNATIONAL split and the rivalry between the messy IF and the orderly RANDOM INTERNATIONAL created an interesting competition, EL Toro and his group discovered the IF. Within a few months that carried the concept of "Everybody should be a host!" further by making every pseud a host. In September 20001 the IF had more than 200 hosts. Then 9/11 struck and the desire to discuss the horror that happened greatly increased the traffic to international forums.

Also, within a few months the 200 hosts of the IF made the forum extremely unstable. It was deleted various times and it wouldn't have survived if not for hosts like Woody Gavotte, who cared for it.. In spring 2002, when the IF was back to eight or ten hosts, the second schism occurred when El Toro, Hobbes, Recycla, Bela and I don't remember who else started the "IF 2.0- the good one".

It was only after the second schism that Yllabian Blue and Kitty and klaatu and also Harry Rutland as far as I remember, discovered the old IF.

In the fall of 2002 I grew tired of hosting the IF and posting in forums.