This is my 1,000th post on robohara.com, and boy have things come a long way. While I first dabbled with running a web server from the house in 1998, the Wayback Machine doesn’t have any record of its existence until 2000, when the URL switched from “welcome.to/theoharas” to “oharanet.net” (I missed the initial domain registration party by a few years and missed most of the good names.) Back before the word “blog” had been injected into public consciousness, I had written a series of ASP scripts that allowed me to post updates remotely on a daily basis. It was a far cry from WordPress and other blogging/CMS packages available today, but it was a start.

In October of 2004 I purchased “robohara.com”, installed WordPress, and the rest was history. I spent a couple of days reformatting some of those old posts (the oldest post dates back to April, 2002) but I must’ve got bored and quit around that time. So starting with that post and not including this one, I’ve updated this page 999 times. This post makes the 1,000th time. Go me.

For my 1,000th post I thought I would repost an interesting list I ran across yesterday.

Bruce Sterling, a cyberpunk/science fiction author (most famous in my circles for writing the non-fictional Hacker Crackdown) posted a list last week on Wired.com titled “Eighteen Challenges in Contemporary Literature.” Here is Sterling’s list:

1. Literature is language-based and national; contemporary society is globalizing and polyglot.

2. Vernacular means of everyday communication — cellphones, social networks, streaming video — are moving into areas where printed text cannot follow.

3. Intellectual property systems failing.

4. Means of book promotion, distribution and retail destabilized.

5. Ink-on-paper manufacturing is an outmoded, toxic industry with steeply rising costs.

6. Core demographic for printed media is aging faster than the general population. Failure of print and newspapers is disenfranching young apprentice writers.

7. Media conglomerates have poor business model; economically rationalized “culture industry” is actively hostile to vital aspects of humane culture.

8. Long tail balkanizes audiences, disrupts means of canon-building and fragments literary reputation.

9. Digital public-domain transforms traditional literary heritage into a huge, cost-free, portable, searchable database, radically transforming the reader’s relationship to belle-lettres.

10. Contemporary literature not confronting issues of general urgency; dominant best-sellers are in former niche genres such as fantasies, romances and teen books.

11. Barriers to publication entry have crashed, enabling huge torrent of subliterary and/or nonliterary textual expression.

12. Algorithms and social media replacing work of editors and publishing houses; network socially-generated texts replacing individually-authored texts.

13. “Convergence culture” obliterating former distinctions between media; books becoming one minor aspect of huge tweet/ blog/ comics/ games / soundtrack/ television / cinema / ancillary-merchandise pro-fan franchises.

14. Unstable computer and cellphone interfaces becoming world’s primary means of cultural access. Compositor systems remake media in their own hybrid creole image.

15. Scholars steeped within the disciplines becoming cross-linked jack-of-all-trades virtual intelligentsia.

16. Academic education system suffering severe bubble-inflation.

17. Polarizing civil cold war is harmful to intellectual honesty.

18. The Gothic fate of poor slain Poetry is the specter at this dwindling feast.

I agree with some of them. A few of them I disagree with, and I’m not sure I even understand one of them. I do think the list is interesting and ties in with last week’s discussion, the gist of which was “when publishing implodes, what happens to writers?”

According to this New York Times article from last week, “only 7.4 million out of the 133 million blogs [tracked] had been updated in the past 120 days. That translates to 95 percent of blogs being essentially abandoned, left to lie fallow on the Web, where they become public remnants of a dream — or at least an ambition — unfulfilled.”

I’m proud to say, robohara.com is one of the 5% that marches on. Happy 1,000th post to me. I’m looking forward to writing another 1,000; I hope you’ll stick around long enough to read them.