Okay, okay! I'll start a blog!

To the FWGNA group: My message of 18Dec09 regarding the community consequences of Bellamya invasion seems to have struck a chord. In addition to the scattering of "atta-boys" I often receive (and always appreciate), last month's post attracted four comments that seem substantive enough to share. John Havel (of Missouri State) wrote me with several insights regarding invasion biology in lakes (as applied to Bellamya in particular), David Campbell (Alabama) offered taxonomic comments, and both Jeremy Tiemann (Illinois Natural History Survey) and Bob Prezant (Montclair) suggested additional references. I have appended (slightly edited) versions of the emails I received from these four gentlemen to the end of my 18Dec09 post. When I first started sending messages to the FWGNA group back in July of 1998, I had never heard the word, "blog." But I just googled-up Wikipedia, and apparently the term itself dates to 1994. The first "hosted blog tools" became available in 1999. In recent years, the internet has become something more like a community, for better or worse. I have always, at least occasionally, posted your comments regarding my monthly essays in the form of a "P.S." in the FWGNA archives. But this is an old-timey pairwise approach, where I say something to you, and then you say something to me. The internet now seems to have developed to a point where everybody expects to talk to everybody else, as a community. OK, okay - I'll start a blog. I don't know how I'll go about doing this, or when the transformation will occur. But the advantages of group communication are as obvious to me as they must be to everybody I'm talking to right now, pairwise. So we'll keep in (better) touch, Rob