With my slack attendance to this blog, I totally missed that it was my blog birthday on 27 July. Begun in 2004, it's been two years of beating this strange drum of words and web relationships.

Some taint of nostalgia hangs like a miasma around this event. Since I've been tres disconnected from the blog and the blogging community for a couple of months, it feels like I'm marking a wake rather than a celebratory moment.

But I'm not ready to hang up my blogging shoes yet. I just have to get back in the swing of things. One thing I'm realizing/remembering is that the blogosphere is not the world. (No sh*t, Sherlock.) The whole "echo chamber" thing where information reverberates from one blog to another, amplified and annotated with opinion, is not necessarily a good thing.

I was shocked when I was reminded that less than half of Americans are online. It's easy to forget this when there are important discussions going on in the blogs. It's easy for me to assume that the information I have access to is accessible to everyone. It's not. It's easy for me to assume everyone is able to double-check and verify information from news reports instead of just trusting the veracity of the evening news or one newspaper.

Since I've been online in one form or another since 1985 or '86, it's difficult for me to remember what it was like to not be able to seek out information and people through the internet. This is not a new realization, for me or in general, but it still strikes me curiously strong.

I've been also remembering how much I like print magazines. While the lack of intermediary editors is a good thing for blogs, it's not always best for providing context.

So this is a stilted and awkward birthday celebration, full of memories while looking forward to giving you, dear reader, my snide opinion and arrogant attitude more often over the next year. Cheers!

(And, yes, that is a picture of your host, la DemiOrator (nee Wordlackey), at the top of this post. Use enough Photoshop filters on someone and it's amazing how good they can look. Really.)