Saturday, October 25, 2014

What Mark Upon This World?

What mark will we make, we bloggers, upon this world?  What stain will we leave to prove that we were ever here at all?

There was a highly entertaining blogger named Riley, up until his sudden exit from this and any other scenes in July, 2013.  The blog can still be found at:

doghouseriley.blogspot.com

Boy, that was one mighty entertaining blog right there.  I, and lots of other people, really enjoyed the hijinks over there.  Mr. Riley, aka James Riley, aka J.B.S. Riley, was a real hoot, in life, and here's the good news:  he's still a real hoot after all this time, and it seems like Google's policy will be to allow him to remain a hoot indefinitely.   I just checked the site and it's unchanged since the last post on July 24, 2013.  It's possible that Google will allow it to remain, unchanged, in its entirety, for all time.  You should go over and start reading.  Read a hundred thousand words!  It will all repay the effort.  Riley was good. 

What evidence do I have that such an eternal presence is possible?  Check out the Blogspot blogs.  There are thousands of blogs, perhaps millions, that were set up a long time ago and then allowed to lapse.  This blog right here has been nurtured with love since 2007, but some are not so lucky.  Some blogs are abandoned after a few months of halfhearted posting, some after one single solitary post.  They  remain there, sorry things, and if you want to take the name for a new blog of your own you will be disappointed.  They will remain there, poor stunted, moribund things, probably forever, taking up space, and some very catchy names by the way.

This is probably a function of the huge, luxurious excess of "cloud" storage space that now exists.  My blog, how many thousands of posts are there?  But how many bits or bytes is that?  Enough to worry about?  It's just text, most of it.  The pictures and vid's are elsewhere, aren't they?  Text requires almost no space at all!  Why not leave it there when I die!  Forever!  Perhaps posterity will discover some value in it that Google can monetize!  One never knows.

So maybe I will be appreciated for having written this blog.  Some day!  Perhaps a hundred, or two hundred, or a thousand years from now.  Appreciated for some clever turn of phrase, or for my socially progressive attitude, or maybe for my wonderful musical suggestions.  But I'll tell you right now, if people in the future are still paying attention to old school blogs from these Dark Ages of ours, they'll be paying attention to the Doghouse Riley's of our benighted and dimwitted world, and not to me.  Riley will be searchable.  Riley got some serious hit counts, lots of re-posts, and lots of mentions up there where it counts.  Those will be the mechanics of the future searches.  That's how they'll find "the good stuff." And don't worry, I'm not bitter.  He really was better than me in every way.  I'd rather read him than me, myself. 

So if you are a visitor from the future, thanks for stopping by.  I hope that you pass a good time, I really do.  If you get bored, try stopping by over at doghouseriley.blogspot.com.  That Riley, he's a real hoot. 

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