There's a guy named Phil Watts Jr. who drops me a line every once in a while. I believe he started reading my mad blather way back when I was doing Damage Control for Rap Pages, back in the days of the dinosaurs (the mid 90s). He's often asked me when I will get back to doing a regular column.

Another guy called Neilalien, who celebrated the third anniverary of his blog recently, started reading my work at either the dearly departed NextPlanetOver.com (version 3, it's on version 5 now) or at SpinnerRack.com (version 1, it's on version 2 and headed to 3 now). He seems to like my work a lot, has put a link to my site on his, and has threatened to keep moving me up in his standings if I write regularly, and about comics once in a while.

Eric Stephenson will, I'm certain, one day be a publishing magnate. He's had some insanely brilliant ideas for magazines and content dissemination over the years, and is currently director of marketing for Image Comics. He actually inspired the Operative Word title and column, and often queries me about what I'm doing in that direction.

The list goes on. For my part, after getting fired from AOL three days before my birthday, I am actually pretty concentrated on my fiction writing. Sitting in bed, Apple Pro Keyboard on my lap, Titanium PowerBook happily churning the text into digital form. I did a lot of journalism (as this archive section can clearly show) and very little of it is memorable. The nature of journalism is the next story, the next issue, and so on. Few grow up to be Woodward and Bernstein. Most springboard into -- you guessed it -- lucrative book deals (if they can).

Still, I kept writing my Soapbox columns. I like shouting into the void. I'm always surprised when I discover someone is listening. I record my life and experiences and thoughts as much as a living document of my existence as it is a commentary on these insane times.

So I've been batting around the idea of switching from my existing format to a kind of "front page" along the lines of the stuff I did in those halcyon dot-bomb days. I finally bit the bullet, cracked open GoLive (to save myself some time writing tables) and got down to it. Here's hoping it works.

Of course I'd love to hear what you think about all this. In any case, I didn't have to change a lot of links or even think very hard about the information design side of doing this, so I'm feeling pretty encouraged about it for now.

Here's hoping it doesn't all burn down in the next day or so ...