One Year of R World

I made my first post to R World one year ago on 17 August 2006. Combined postings to my various blogs since then: 501. (This total is unsurprising: on my first day of blogging, I made 9 posts. On the second, I made 6, at which point my daughter told me I was being ridiculous and I consciously slowed down, trying to make my idearrhea less public.) Since then, I've written about a variety of topics, but have tagged more (140) with "politics" than any other label.

What I've done with my blog:
* Did my bit to drive down George (I'm-so-far-in-over-my-head-I-don't-know-I'm-in-over-my-head) Bush's approval ratings.
* By modeling my own love of family, helped to persuade Karl (one-of-the-top-ten-signs-your-college-roommate-is-a-Nazi-is-that-he-spells-his-name-Carl-with-a-"K) Rove to leave the White House in order to spend more time with his family.
* Helped to loosen the grip of the (we-have-too-much-power-to-bother-with-a-conscience) Republicans on DC.
* Predicted the future far enough into the future that most people will actually have forgotten what I've predicted unless it turns out to be accurate, in which case I'll remind everyone who will listen.
* Written more about social evolution and social invention than any two other bloggers combined.
* Made a variety of suggestions for presidential politics, including:
- adding "Secretary of Happiness" to the cabinet positions reporting to the president,
- converting the White House into a museum open to the people and have the president live, instead, in a "Green House" that is a model of environmental friendliness.
- turn the presidency into a two-person job.
* Pointed out how Viagra might explain why we've apparently lost a generation of leaders who, by now, ought to have lost their acute interest in creating children and focused instead on making the world better for their grandchildren.
* Advocated turning one's life into an experiment, ala Bucky Fuller.
* Argued for an upgrade to civilization's operating system, a change in fundamental philosophy.
* Predicted a transformation of the modern corporation into a post-Information Age construct that facilitates the evolution of employees into entrepreneurs
* Explained why farts are funny, why Americans are more religious than Europeans, and how we must have inadvertently shipped the Iraqis our old version of Democracy 1.0 - the one that still has the ethnic cleansing bug.
* Coined terms like idearrhea, bulimic shopper, and the computer unconscious.
* Been politely ignored by billions of Internet users instead of just my small group of friends and family.

Most of all, I've had fabulous fun writing. (The difference between writing for a blog and simply writing onto my hard drive is like the difference between singing in the shower and singing in the shower with the window open. When the window is open, someone might actually walk by and hear.) Thanks for reading. Thanks for writing (and letting me read your blogs). And thanks for your comments. Thank you. Seriously. Without readers like you, I'd be the one blog on the Internet with no readers, an entity either deserving of the label "blob" or "blah" instead of blog. In either case, it wouldn't be the same.