When you visit this here journal, if you really want the full experience, don't just check for new entries.  Scroll back a little, to see whether other recent entries have new or changed comments.

Case in point: look two entries ago, at " Holiday Newsletter, part 3".  This has collected three comments since it was posted on May 28.

And if you read those, you see my social network in action.

The first two are "anonymous," in the sense that Dreamwidth itself doesn't know who posted them.  Neither would a random reader (one who doesn't already know me).

The first comment, though, was not anonymous to me, because the commenter included her first name at the bottom of the text.  The second commenter didn't do that, so I didn't know who had left it; I guessed, but my guess turned out to be wrong.

Which brings us to the third comment, which isn't anonymous in any sense: I posted it, as a reply to the second.  Its main point: to ask Commenter 2 to identify oneself.

And today, having learned who that was, I further edited the third comment, thus "outing" her.

Exciting stuff, huh?  A reality show, you might say: learn more about not just me, but my friends and relatives too.

Back on March 18, I promised you [yet] another installment of my so-called "holiday newsletter."  I said that it would continue to talk about my interactions with people, moving the focus to social media (and Dreamwidth, in particular).  So here goes.

As it turns out, March 18 is not the date of my most recent journal entry before today's.  On May 13, I posted "Everybody wants a piece of me, I guess".  That's a silly title for a posting whose actual purpose was to let readers know that I had had hernia surgery two days earlier.

And that May 13 posting is a perfect example of what this journal entry is supposed to be about: how (e.g.) Dreamwidth could be an effective tool in strengthening the bonds between (e.g.) me and the people I care about.

You see, even for an extreme introvert like me, there are rather a lot of such people.  People who might like to know when I have something like a hernia operation.  Enough of them so that, in my weakened state two days after the surgery, it was not feasible to email, or call, all of them.

By posting it on Dreamwidth, I made it theoretically possible that they all would learn about it.  But of course that didn't actually happen; to the best of my knowledge, nobody actually found out about the surgery through that medium alone.  Why not?  Because very few people check my journal often enough for it to serve that purpose.

To the limited extent that that is anyone's "fault," it's mine.  The root problem is that I don't post often enough.

On the other hand, I might post more often if I knew that more people were checking.

So here's my plan: after posting this entry, I will begin a two-pronged effort.  An effort to post more often, and, concurrently, a "marketing" effort.  I will contact a collection of people who might be willing to experiment with checking my Dreamwidth more often … and who then might continue to do so, if I keep up my end of the bargain, and post more often—particularly, with "news items" that my friends and relatives might want to know.

My diabolical plan is more complicated than that.  But this journal entry is—as almost always—already quite long enough.  I will finish by inviting you, if you feel like it, to play a guessing game.  Namely, about the series of journal entries of which this one is the third: can you figure out what their content has to do with the phrase with which I titled them, namely, "Holiday Newsletter"?

January 2025

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