all we need to do is make sure we keep talking

Stats tell me that vastly more people read this blog via RSS than by actually coming to its actual home on the Intarwebs. That's cool with me, because that's the way I read pretty much every site I care about online; it's just easier to see what Bloglines has found for me than it is to go through a huge bookmark file.

However, if that's the way you do it (and there's nothing wrong with that) you will miss out on conversations that take place in comments. If you're lucky enough to have readers who are smarter than the average bear (as I am) you'll miss out on some really insightful and interesting comments and discussion.

There's been some really great conversation on some recent posts, that may be is totally worth your time to check out, RSS readers:

There's lots of great stuff in The Culture of Fear and media:point the finger at yourself, including comments from people who live in Boston and experienced yesterday's, uh, incident, firsthand. The Obligatory Biography kept showing up as new in your RSS reader because readers kept giving me great advice on how to make it better. (It's a huge bonus that so many students, journalists, librarians, and smarter-than-me people read my crap, I tell you what.) But the best stuff in recent memory was in ye gods, it doth amaze me, where some extraordinarily smart people who know a hell of a lot more about Roman history and mythology than I do educated me, and inspired me to read and learn more.

This is a great part of being a blogger that I think is far too often overlooked by a lot of us: immediate interaction and discussion with a diverse group of people, separated by distance and culture and all the other things that create distance between people, bridged by our ability and desire to just talk with each other.