The Coracle is currently enjoying its fourth incarnation. I've been doing this since 2002 when I started with what was a light-hearted satirical site that lampooned the excesses of The Episcopal Church. The bishop of the diocese in which I lived and worked [although he was not my canonical bishop] took umbrage at my humor and called me into a weird one-on-one with him, explaining that it would be best if I surrendered it. What was odd is that he kept referring to the weblog as "e-mail". Huh?
This meant, of course, that he had never read it and had no clue what it was. One of my colleagues, not one of my fans, had obviously complained in that passive manner of clergy and I was to be indirectly corrected. I agreed, of course, and "deleted" the weblog as soon as I got home. Well, I took it offline. There was too much gold in those postings to erase the whole shebang.
Then I started the first version of The Coracle. Yeah, that same evening. I've improved portions of it, refined it through two more editions, became far less satirical and more esoteric, don't care what any bishop thinks of it, and have indulged my eclectic interests through 8224 postings and 412K viewings. It has been and continues to be fun.
My point is that it's become a part of what I do and is far superior to any other form of public media. As a colleague noted:
I think that the old blogosphere was superior to “social media” like Twitter and Facebook for a number of reasons. First, as a loosely-coupled system, instead of the tightly-coupled systems built by retweets and shares, it was less prone to cascading failure in the form of waves of hysteria. Second, because there was no central point of control, there was no way to ban people. And you didn’t need one, since bloggers had only the audience that deliberately chose to visit their blogs.I also have a feeling that, as people drift away from Facebook and can't deal with the toxic narcissism of Twitter, that the "blogosphere" will be born anew.