Backwash

[bewing]

It looks to me like backwash.com, where I have written some "articles", is going down for the count. At some as-yet-unspecified future date, to be sure -- but the decay seems more than just progressive at this point. It'll be sad if it gets nuked, because there is a lot of clever content buried in there -- especially on old messageboard threads. I

Comments

[bewing]

I agree with you to a large extent, and I'd enjoy hearing your thoughts. The thing was, BW was not intended to be just a party among the columnists. I never was sure what it would take to actually get a community of readers to interact with me, or with us -- but if it had actually happened, I think that would have been far more interesting than interacting with most of the set of columnists we ended up having. Of course, one thought was: interacting with each other would encourage interaction from outside -- but that scheme (and all others) failed for some reason. Seems like a marketing problem to me, and therefore far beyond my milieu. In some sense, I'd have to disagree, and say that one critical failure WAS ringy's problem -- once we knew the basic premise of the site wasn't working, it was his (and only his) responsibility to find a fix, axe the site as a failure, or sell it quick to someone who *could* figure out the answer.

But yes, it's been clear for years that unless we found some magic that suddenly made the readers talk to us, BW was a dead duck. Chatting with the other columnists was fun and all, as long as the columnists there were charming and idiosyncratic enough to be entertaining. The ones left are all very conformist and intolerant of non-PC thought. So, I am bailing on the blue side for precisely the reason you named.

Yes, David does deserve credit for his creation. It spawned an offshoot that he calls the "Sparta Social Network" software. He has sold quite a few copies, and made money on it, as I understand. You perhaps do not know that there was a hacker attack on ALL ringy's sites a month ago, that disabled all of them. Repairing the paying sites is the top priority, of course. This is why BW is sitting there, basically broken, all this time -- with no expectation of being repaired for several more months, if ever. So: he has most certainly not given up on his "projects" -- except for the non-paying one, perhaps: backwash.