... other writers trying to do a decent weblog who wish to compare and contrast, plus curious readers of my weblog, PressThink, students in a Net journalism class, maybe. In place of an FAQ page, I now have this. I am posting it today so it can become a standing link under the About section.

Some of these questions are asked frequently by readers or seen in comments. Others I ask myself. My point is to explain how a weblog like this works, according to the person who thought it up and does it. No relevance to other weblogs or writers is claimed. Part of my purpose is to observe what author Rebecca Blood said about the ethic of transparency-- "one of the weblog's distinguishing characteristics and greatest strengths." This is a transparency post. (I'll probably add sections as I go along, so comments are welcome. But if you're point is..."too much meta," we covered that.)

Why are PressThink posts so long?

When I started asking around about how to do a weblog, I got many kinds of answers. The one advisory every informant gave was: you must write in short bursts. That's the style, some said. That's what works, said others. And, most suspicious of all, that's what busy, web-cruising readers expect. They don't have time for your leisurely thesis, I was told. By everyone.

So you decided to be contrarian and go the other way?

No, contrarians are annoying. I didn't set out to write long essays; it happened as I tried to turn my ideas into posts that said something others weren't saying, and got some notice. (And I can do short, sometimes.) I set out to be unrestricted: free to figure out for myself what works, what PressThink wants to be.

"People don't have time for..." reasoning was meaningless to me, and I didn't trust it. It wanted to restrict my freedom to write what I think, but the whole purpose in starting PressThink was liberation: "Wow, my own magazine. Now I can write what I think." It's the same for most webloggers, I would guess. My interest was users who did have time for depth, in whatever number they may prove to exist, ocean to ocean, post to post.

But it's more like: this is my magazine, PressThink... If you like it, return. In a tiny and abstract way, perhaps, my blog is part of the media marketplace, competing for eyeballs with re-runs of Law and Order. But not really. PressThink, a free citizen in a voluntary nation, doesn't have to behave like a market actor. Thus my experiment in long form.