The one-month mark
Okay, so this weblog has been up for a month, the software's trial period and thus our own self-imposed trial period. What have we found?
We were afraid that we wouldn't find anything to say. We should not have been concerned.
We were concerned that what we said would not be worth reading. But of course the reader makes that decision, and most people have internalized Sturgeon's Law at any rate. (One of the things that make this world so enjoyable is that everyone has his own ten percent.)
We were not concerned about our ranking on the blogrolls. We just wanted to take a month to try out this new way of making web pages.
We are not new to web design, and in fact some of us have developed and published other well-visited pages. (And we aren't going to tell you which ones. Not at this point.) We have concluded that Radio provides a way for those who do not know HTML at all to get their thoughts onto a page and onto computer screens. Some knowledge of HTML does help to fine-tune the output, however.
The habits of linking to items of interest and of putting thoughts on the page are not new to us, either. We have been using the internet for several years, and in that time we have developed the habit of clipping items, short and long, for later review and retrieval. Indeed, one of our abiding interests is in the use of various kinds of software which help with this process. Putting these on the weblog simply requires choosing from those items that would otherwise just be stuffed into our archive for later personal perusal (if not simply stored and forgotten, like the boxes in our respective basements). These pages probably represent about 1% of this one month's stuff in our archives. Our personal archives and this weblog archive are both different ways of storing and making available the objets trouves of our online wanderings. So we agree with Howard Bashman that it really doesn't take all that much time to do this. If we had not developed such compulsive habits years ago, of course, it would be well-nigh impossible.
We have gotten a sense of what works and what doesn't, and we have learned some of the key concepts. One of them is what we call "blogorrhea". That will be the subject of a later post.
So we have paid our $40 fee and we will continue. We may accelerate or decelerate our activity at various times, and for various reasons. The nice thing about this venture is that we can do so at will, and no one will criticize us.
We have obtained our own domain name for this site: http://www.litig8r.net. We have found that some enterprising sort has locked down multiple variations on TheLitigator.com and wants to sell them all in bulk. He probably wants far more than we would be willing to pay for this essentially amateur professional activity. So we went with what was available.
Unlike some other loggers, this may be the last time we provide any comments or information about our personal lives. The whole purpose of this enterprise, after all, is to talk about the law, technology, politics, language, and the world, though not necessarily in that order. We will talk about ourselves in other environments.
We will conclude with our own answer to a question: Are weblogs the long-awaited killer app? We think not. They are a way to facilitate the use of the web for one-to-many communication, but adapting them to two-way or multi-user communication takes a bit of work, requiring some rather esoteric knowledge, and this tends to keep them out of the grasp of most users. The attempt to approximate two-way or multi-way conversation requires links and the use of referral logs, an amazing series of computer contortions.
The "killer app" is the Holy Grail of geekdom. And every user probably has his own idea of what it would incorporate. Our concept of the killer app for multi-user web-based discussion and communication includes ease of use and access, the absence of barriers to use, an intuitive design, multiple ways of gaining access, and an automatic recording of the conversation for later review and retrieval, with all the fluff out of the way. And, above all, no damned advertisements. (YahooGroups thus fails on a couple of these counts.)
What is the killer app? For the use we have described, we think QuickTopic hits closest to the mark. We invite you to a page there to demonstrate.
1:20:53 PM 
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