(And to think... one of the projects I'm working on this week will only serve to speed up the weblog communities even faster then they already work now, and to help them draw closer together dynamically... I'm certainly not helping to slow things down any...)

Just a bit of introspection here, and hey, I'll end it with a cliche, why not? Where will I be 5 years from now at this rate of change of rate of change? (That's not a typo.) Wow. The answers boggle the mind.

For me, who's never really known a world that has been changing at anything less then exponential speed, it is so easy to forget that even now, it is not like this for everybody. I am incapable of understanding on a gut level a world where change is slow, news is from last month, and adding 1,000,000 numbers together is impractical because even if you take the time to do it, your result will be too full of error to be useful.

Step back for a moment and look around you at those who are not connected to the Internet (not just online, but actually living 'here' to some extent). It's easy to forget how differently we see the world then those who are not connected... we get news in hours, including thoughtful opinions, commentary, and opposing positions, if you know where to look. (Sure, network news comes in hours, too, but its a very limited subset of what I see online.) Fads occur in a matter of hours, and can last no more then days. (Mahir, anyone?) There are two sides to nearly every issue, even the ones you'd think are a cinch for one side like "internet censorship", not just the Network News view.

Of course, a lot of stuff happens in the real world, too, we just never hear about it because we lack the communication channels.

If I disappear for 3 months from home to go to college, my mother can catch me up in significant events in the church, my extended family, and the events of interest in the town in less then an hour. Meanwhile, she has little clue what goes on online in my life, because that much interesting stuff happens online in a day, and I can't explain it all to her in a reasonable amount of time. Even my fiance thinks I'm a little bit nuts running a daily website. (To the best of my knowlege, none of those people are reading this on a daily basis.)

However... I should come back with a bang.

Pause. I'm going home for Spring Break tommorow, and network connectivity at home is actually worse then it is here. Odds are, I won't be updating this site at all until I get back.

"So now I've got a community and some interesting discussions, but some people have alerted me to their perceived degradation of the metafilter community. ... So now I'm wondering, how can I stop any decrease in the quality of discussions at metafilter?"