The mission of this blog is

This blog is an open journal. I don’t know why I like having a public notebook that nobody reads, just that I do like it. It serves enough of a purpose that I keep doing it.

• I am not seeking readers here. My guess at the readership is five people, all of whom know me well enough to send a direct email.
• This blog is public. It is not for secrets. I expect that a little of this writing will be read by business connections.
• It is indexed by search engines, but is low on the search results for my name. I don’t expect many business connections to find it.

Personal blogs like this one are a dead medium. In their 2000-2010 heyday I had enough readership here to think of it as a publishing platform, but that time has passed and isn’t coming back. Independent blogs are now for either professionals on the scale of Gawker or journals on the scale of this one.

But the rock-bottom readership here allows me to do writing at low risk. This blog would be a better place than Facebook for damning party photos or abrasive politics.  I don’t have to worry about context collapse.

Until I started blogging around 2001 I filled up physical notebooks, Moleskine-style. My writing voice there was about the same as on this blog. Even this post could be one of those journal entries. They weren’t intensely personal. They weren’t confessional.  I wrote blue sky ideas, drew inventions, endlessly redrafted the same essay.

A blog that is read by few people is a social medium like any other. It’s a cowpath in the making.