Great Lakes Cyberspace

When I started this blog about a year ago, I knew I wasn’t the only person interested in the Great Lakes, but I had no idea of the vast network and numbers of people who care about it, too. Over the course of this year, I have learned about the politics, ecology, and culture of this wide area. I have learned about the issues, organizations, and people who care about preserving and protecting it.

This morning I learned that one of the best blogs about the Great Lakes would be ending. In today’s posting on Great Lakes Blogger, Dave Dempsey tells us he will be shutting down his blog, probably permanently. This saddens me because I will miss Dave’s posts. He has kept me informed about the issues facing the Great Lakes. He has steered me in the direction of Great Lakes art and culture. Without it, I am not sure I would have read Jerry Dennis’s wonderful book The Living Great Lakes and it is because of a posting of Dave’s that I have a book about (and by) Women of the Great Lakes on my holiday wish list.

Writing a blog is a weird thing. Unless someone posts a comment to what you write, you don’t really know who is reading your work. Is your post just going out in the vast cyberspace never to be seen again? Or is someone looking forward to your every word and just not saying so? Who knows? Yes, I have a meter on my site and yes, I check the statistics, but I am not sure how meaningful they are. When it tells me someone has been on my site for 5 minutes and read 5 pages, have they really read it, just looked at the pictures or did their finger accidentally hit the arrow key to scroll through five pages and then got called away to the telephone for five minutes?

Maybe Dave feels the same. I am not sure why he will not be writing his blog anymore (he doesn’t say) but I hope we will still be reading him on Great Lakes Town Hall. That is another wonderful site that I check frequently. Dave is one of the founders of that group and now one of its moderators. His posts are always worth reading – whether on his own site, the Town Hall forum or in the books he has written. Thanks, Dave for a good run.

By the way, any and all comments are appreciated on this site. It lets me know you are out there. If you want to comment just click on “Comment” at the end of the post. If you want to send me an email through this site, click on my profile, and under my picture (which my husband took last winter at the Florida Keys) you will see a link to send an email.

Thanks. I look forward to hearing from you.