I’m not sure yet. Perhaps I’m blogging.

I’ve had a web site here, a “home page,” since the dawn of time. (By “dawn of time” I mean of course the early 1990s. Do I have to defend that? The starting line of history varies for different media. [By “medium” I mean communications channel.] Different media have different event horizons. If one’s sense of the past depends on television, the world barely existed before the 1950s. The genius of Ken Burns was to extend documentary filmmaking further back in time than had seemed possible before: creating the illusion of motion pictures showing the Civil War, the beginning of baseball, the first days of jazz.)

(The medium—the communications channel—on which all others depend is the written word. It embodies the ultimate event horizon. Before the written word, there is no history.)

But I digress.

You will recall that blogs (web logs) were invented c. 1999 (no quibbles, please), and, much as I liked reading them, I didn’t want to write one. My web site was a useful place to post some of my writing that was otherwise wrapping dead fish; occasionally I would update the introductory text to comment on something or other, or to beg help from readers on a research question, but these occasional and transient thoughts were hardly worth saving, as blogs do.

Now that I’ve finished my book about information, hardly a day goes by that I don’t encounter something new that I wish I could have discussed, or that I did discuss in a different light. I hear new news every day, the great proto-blogger Robert Burton wrote nearly four centuries ago. He added,

I did for my recreation now and then walk abroad, look into the world, and could not choose but make some little observation, not so wise an observer as a plain rehearser …