When I started writing in this space in 1999, there were only 12,000 active blogs in the world. Now there are 11,750 times that number.
141 million.
When I started this page, the word "blog" didn't yet exist. I called it "my web site." I still do. "Blogs" exploded a few years later, and they were woefully uninteresting, self-indulgent, I-burned-my-toast-this-morning chronicles of uninteresting people's stupefyingly boring lives. They were atrociously written and of no conceivable interest to anyone but the writer—and probably not even him, given the number of abandoned blogs out there. Worse, they became vehicles through which people passive-aggressively communicated that they were crushing on you, or that they're thinking about something that reads a lot like suicide, so you better not break up with them.
Long-time readers are no doubt preparing a list of links to posts where I'm guilty of one or all of these indulgences. You can stop. I know.
And then every traditional media outlet decided that blogs are the future, so by damn, they better have one too. So they labeled reporters' columns "blogs."
To summarize, first I didn't call Stank a blog because the word didn't exist. Then I didn't because blogs were a fad among very stupid people. And now I don't because the term has become passe.
I've resisted all sorts of conventions. Comments, most noticeably. I could turn them on with the flick of a switch, and surely many readers would enjoy it. But the entire web has become a urinal for hateful, vile people, and I just flat-out don't want them whizzing on my little corner of it.
I caved to pressure in 2005 and implemented RSS, and at the same time I made a conscious choice to make the content more character-driven when I could. If you feel like you've gotten to know Percy, Dorkass, Allie, et. al., then that shift succeeded.
But that's it. That's as much as the site has evolved. I have resisted social networking integration as much as I've resisted comments and the word "blog." There are no mechanisms for Digging a post or Liking it on Facebook, and you do not see updates about my bowel movements in a Twitter feed on the sidebar. Why? After all, one well-Dugg post would probably increase my daily readership tenfold. Do I care?
Do you see a "Digg This" logo anywhere?
And so Stank stubbornly remains what the industry refers to as "Web 1.0." My question to you is a quite sincere do you care? Do you want to be able to Digg articles or to see that Twitter feed?
I'm implementing a retrofit. Speak now. What do you want?