I love anagrams. (I love palindromes even more, but they are harder.) For someone not even a generation removed from yellow legal pads and #2 pencils, the whole concept of “blog” feels like a “glob” to me. You natter away on a keyboard, you shove words around with abandon, you hit a few magic buttons, and before you know it, your words are wafted into the ether and you can’t take them back, ever. All those words, swarming around in space. A glob of words. Do I sound old? No doubt I do. But before you write me off as a grump, let me say, I love this new, free, unfettered way of communicating. I love the populism of it. All these years I’ve been publishing magazines and books, it has been largely one-way communication. We put stuff out there, you read it (or not). The number of responses a traditional editor gets is miniscule compared to the number of people reading the whatever. Now, we put stuff out there and you, dear reader, can cheer, clap, boo, hiss, object. You can top us. You can take right over. It’s a little scary for us old traditional editors, but it is also very, very good for our craft. I hope you will use this new community website everywhich way you can. I hope you will start your own forums (fora, my old Latin teacher would note) around what interests you, I hope you will get together with your peers, I hope you will give us voluble feedback so that we can do more publishing that is just what you want. I hope you will post pictures of the stuff you’re making, whether it’s absolutely wonderful or whether it needs a little help from your cyber-friends. I hope you will all be great resources for each other. I do have one last contrary hope, though. I hope you do not spend so much time online, either here or on other craft sites, that you forget to go to your loom. In the end, it’s all about weaving. In other words, Data Here View = I Weave thread.
