cleanup

I just spent a few minutes reviewing my links to the right and deleting those that were no longer active. I think I got them all. Actually, anyway, that's not true I didn't delete those that were no longer active in total, as there were some I couldn't bear to get rid of (Sorrow at Sills Bend for instance) although I'm pretty certain we're not going to see anything happen there again. But who knows. But it's still worth reading anyway.

I wonder if the Buggles have anything to say about Facebook killing the blogosphere. It was an interesting few minutes I just spent reminiscing over links that once led to so much dazzling effort and action which now lead you to dead pages with a few scant chinese characters or random instructions about hotmail. 

Lorraine Crescent is coming up to its first decade. In the early days, being a blogger did get you some very minor celebrity and looking back on it I realise it was a little like public radio and/or the fanzine world was for me in the early 80s - you were in an elite network and a lot of your consumers were producers themselves, it was a bit like that Robert Wyatt line from an early Soft Machine song, about pop stars who 'drink each other's wine, plough each other's earth', with slightly less of the sexual connotation. It wasn't quite as exciting as the early 80s because nothing could be (joke), but it had that mutual pleasure-in-the-possibilities-of-a-medium, it-was-easy-it-was-cheap-go-and-do-it sense to it. 

I won't say that's all gone, because I still enjoy blogging, though I have always hated the word (I always hated the word 'fanzine' too if it comes to that, and don't start me on 'zine'). I have much less time these days because of work, which is fine, because work satisfies a lot of the things that things like blogging used to be for (and so, in all honesty, does Facebook). These days I imagine (probably ridiculously; I suppose I could wake up tomorrow morning to find all of blogger - what is blogger? - has disappeared into the vortex) that this is more of a real diary than anything - a genuine record that I can look back on for things I did and said. How egotistical. But as I said in the title of the last post, it's not like I'm forcing it on you. Am I?