BELOW YOU WILL SEE MY LAST BLOG POSTING: I have a job that requires a lot of time and brain power, one that leaves me too tired to research and write properly. To those forty thousand or so who visit each week I thank you for liking me enough to drop by. For those of you who blog and seek to build traffic, let me offer this: I never did any of the kiss ass things everyone else has done nor any of the stuff that other "pros" suggest be done in order to build traffic; I did not link to other sites for a quid-pro-quo; I did not do mass emails; I didn't do the back links or anything else. The traffic came on its own, but much is from Google links because I somehow got on their list. I have never run an ad and have never made a dime from this blog effort, nor did I ever have the intention of doing so. The "blogosphere" has changed since I started, in many ways for the better. There are many professionals from many fields who now write opinions that cannot be found in any other medium, and this is good. I only point to auto extremist and the Boeing blog as two outstanding examples out of many.

BUT there are many more who are now in it for the money they think they can make from advertising, much of it through links to sites that pay them off. Many more are using it for publicity in order to make money in their "real businesses." Others agree to secretly shill for political parties or candidates. Money corrupts. Just consider what might happen if you dared to say "motherfucker" or any one of a hundred "dirty words" when ad money is coming in. What else cannot be said? The term Political Correctness isn't always the Left imposing their restrictions on everyone else, it can be any advertiser(s) pulling money out from under you because what is said "offends." The entire idea of blogging was total freedom and if it now drifts into the MSM concept of ad supported writing it's all over. A tried and true method of building traffic is to plant phony comments in one's own comment section (Kos and Democratic Underground anybody?) in order to create blogger rage, one which mentions the blogger's name (naturally) as they quote from the horrible comments. I didn't do that stuff either.

I have enjoyed my three years of shooting off my mouth without fear of retribution other than to receive some of the nastiest emails imaginable. I have also found that too many bloggers actually save comments made on their sites for use against the writer at a later date. Many actually go sites other than their own just to read comments from other bloggers which they save for use against him at a later time; there are about ten more or less high traffic sites who let me know they'd punish me for my comments on other sites by refusing to link to me.

I never gave a fat fuck and I don't now. And BTW my traffic is greater than most of theirs.

Merry Christmas and it's been a fun ride.