ODAY, after 18 years (this blog started in 2004), I am publishing the 2,222^nd blog post. Over at Techrights we’ve just exceeded 34,000. TuxMachines approaches 170,000.

didn’t think we’d get here, but here we are. The “over 9,000″ jokes seem like only yesterday (I can still recall the IRC conversation about exceeding 9,000 blog posts) and since then, one grand (1,000) at the time, we kept climbing higher.

We have a large trove of material left to publish, but we’re pacing it down somewhat so as to not overwhelm readers. It’s strategic, too.

This past week we worked on developing a new CMS (a very simple one, but also very lightweight). We can’t wait to take it live. It’s probably safe to say that Techrights will still be around a decade from now; if the World Wide Web perishes, we still have IRC, IPFS, Gemini, and daily plain-text bulletins that can be dispatched in all sorts of ways. In a way, we’ve already secured our future.

This post will be the 33,999^th one. Next up is the “real” 34k.

VER the past couple of weeks we have made major visual changes in Tux Machines, including modernisation that keeps up with new browser technologies like CSS3. Traffic in the site is growing fast and we hope to gain readers who are as passionate about Free software as we are.

Now, some might say that Twitter et al. are the next MySpace. I would concur. And moreover, the likes of Facebook and Google+ are queued to follow. Facebook staff — not just outside investors — are reportedly dumping their stock this month. They would know. Yes, they see what’s going on inside Facebook.

My hope is that the next generation of social network will be self-hosted and communally-federated. The Diaspora project gives me hope that we already have the necessary code and some deployed platforms (pods) with reasonably good adoption.

The attitude here shows total disregard for the time and effort people have put into various Web site, never mind preservation of valuable public record.

For the disgusting decision made by the new owners of Digg.com, I honestly hope they quickly go out of business; no, not that they would go bankrupt and end up in the streets, just whatever can bring the old site back. What they do is unethical (they require Facebook for login, which in itself is comical) and they show zero respect for those who helped created Digg.com, at great cost to themselves and for no profit.

Last Thursday I crossed the 15,000-article milestone over at Techrights. It still serves a lot of requests owing (for the most part) to the huge archives. Now, just to clarify, there is also a lot of traffic in some other sites such as this one, but when I stopped writing on a regular basis here in schestowitz.com the traffic dropped from about 20,000 hits per day (gradual decline). I wrote 15,000 articles/posts in Techrights, which now serves about a quarter of a million hits per day (since 2010), giving me little reason to post in this personal blog any longer. At Techrights, over the course of 5+ years, I have been posting at the pace of almost 8 posts a day for 5 years (but at the highest points a lot more than the average, with a peak of 31 posts in one day).

Techrights has reached a sort of plateau now — a point where it stays about the same when it comes to traffic, despite expansion in content. The visitors count stopped growing some time around 2009 when I was entering Twitter and was on Twit TV, a TV show I was invited to be in for 1.5 hours or so, speaking for the site. These days I am busier with my jobs and my fiancée, but I still find a lot of time to dent, tweet, blog, and occasionally record shows (although not as much as of late because my co-host and I are exceedingly busy). Thanks to all those who are supporting my work and spreading the key points (even contributing time, HT to “wallclimber” among others). I will carry on doing this for a long time to come. Activism, to me, always comes first (well, family comes first, but it’s a close second).

2009

2012

LOT of people may not know this, but most of my blogging I actually do from a proprietary operating system, Palm OS. I find little reason to write from home, so taking the text out with jpilot and my Palm Tungsten is what inspires me to write long posts such as this one. Much of Techrights is also being composed in Palm OS.

Why Palm Tungsten?

Well, it’s simple really. In one word: keyboard. As devices get smaller and smaller they often neglect to accommodate for productivity, so they resort to gimmicks like touch (which Palm had over a decade ago) and not a good, affordable foldable keyboard.

Is someone else blogging from a PDA?

This blog had published about 1,000 posts before I started writing in another blog (the main blog I write for is still Techrights). My personal life and tricks for management of work are already thoroughly covered here (available through the archives) and other bloggers seem to have followed similar trajectories because other people care about events and ideas, not people. Once there is an exhaustion of subjects to write about regarding one’s life, a writer would naturally write about his/her surroundings. Making critical assessments of different things in the world does not take much effort, but it does take perseverance. There is usually little or no incentive in it. So what is it that motivates people to read the news and remark on it? Sheer boredom or media hype? Whatever it is, the more the issues are brought up, the more a person is likely to become emotionally attached to them and then seek a solution. At the moment my goal is to help abolish software patents. There is never a lack of work to be done in this area and progress is always made towards attaining this goal.

Have topics been exhausted then? Never.

People’s blogs have become somewhat less active and more people choose to post material under other people’s platform (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and so on). Journalists too failed to evolve (for the most part) and their occupation dying, mostly to be replaced by PR. One has to transition constantly. The world today is inventing and progressing faster than ever before, especially on the Web which is relatively new.

London (2010)

arlier today I watched with great patience this wonderful new interview with PZ Myers (thanks, Thunderf00t!), who spoke about his hugely popular science blog. I very much enjoy his site in which he started writing only 7 years ago. It was about 6 years ago that I started my own science blog (on computer vision) and later started another one about my particular area of focus (that was in 2005). They grew nicely and reached the niche whose narrow topic of interest they covered.

I have been thinking recently of the potential to inform people who are my peers through scientific blogs and decided that I will probably restore activity in those older two, as well as this one neglected personal blog where I hardly wrote anything for the past 3 years (it totals 1416 posts though, mostly from the olden days).

I found it gratifying back in the days around 2006 when people in my scientific field knew me in conferences because of my blogs and wanted to hang out with me because of these. The readership grew steadily as long as I kept writing. PZ Myers sees the same type of trend and Techrights, where I wrote over 11,000 posts, is the same. Perhaps I will resume posting in blog form about science later this month or next month. As always, I will separate my professional life, my personal life, and my hobbies (the 4 blogs I run will provide this separation).

On several occasions I was offered an opportunity to write a book, but frankly, I believe that books are seeing their end of days (when older generations are no longer with us, then pen and paper too may vanish). I was fortunate to get into blogging early on, thanks to Free software. It’s a rewarding experience even through there is no pay.