JES asks:

I am interested in why you blog, and why I (and the other writers on the websites I administer) should continue to do so, especially if our online neighborhood becomes increasingly polluted and/or pedestrian, which seems to be the case. Care to share?

 I think it always good to do some reflecting on "why" whether it is about blogging or anything else in life. I won't expand upon my comment at the linked post, but it got me thinking about what my pre-blogging journal was like.

Here's a sample, dated October 10, 1996: I don't know whether Rudy loves computer diskettes, or hates them. I do believe he has diskette radar, though. Last spring he chewed up several which belonged to my husband. One contained both the text and data analysis for his thesis. I awakened on a Saturday morning to pieces of diskettes scattered all over the bed. Bob is generally as easy-going as the day is long, but at that moment, he looked as if he would like to murder someone. Me, I think. Under normal circumstances I would have found it amusing, but since Bob didn't snap out of it for the entire day, I thought it best not to laugh. Then, a couple of weeks ago, Rudy got one of my disks. It contained a lot of personal writing, my resume, a few history term papers, invoices from my computer business, etc. Rudy matters more to me than any computer disk, so I wasn't too upset. And it made me think about technology, and how if it had been paper he couldn't have destroyed that many documents in just a couple of minutes. I can hear the whiny voice of some computer nerd saying, "none of this would have happened if you had only backed up your files."

Added July 2012: diskettes, CD Roms, zip drives, flash drives were not much improvement over ephemera. The 'net has trumped them all.