Happy New Year 2014! And a WIFLI resolution.

Happy New Year 2014!

Being that it is a New Year, I have made a resolution. For the last two years, I allowed this blog to go dormant. The WIFLI Briefings, as I was doing them in 2012 and 2013, were clearly too time-consuming for me to put together along with other endeavors that I've been involved with. Since I still have the desire to keep this blog alive, I had to determine a way to produce the most posts in the limited amount of time that I could commit to in this venue.

A lot of thought has gone into finding the right solution, and making this decision. I ventured back into the blog archives. The format of the blogs had evolved in various ways since its beginning days in April of 2008. The appearance of the blogs, and the use of just one story per post, seemed to work the best as I was doing them in 2011, up until I made the big change to multi-story posts in December of 2011. That turned out to be a very bad mistake in my ongoing blog experiment. I went from 228 posts in 2011, down to 47 in 2012 and just two in 2013. Part of the reason for the waning numbers was due to other endeavors I was working on. One of the distractions was that I turned to reading a lot of  ebooks. And the other major time consuming project was the development of a Facebook page called johnny2k's America. A big part of that page has been the building of a large video archive for that page.

As it turns out, I realized that both this blog and keeping up on Facebook can work together. Good stories that I find through my friends on Facebook can be posted here, and other stories that I find that I post here, can then be posted on johnny2k's America.

One big problem that I had with doing the multi-story posts in 2012 and 2013 was the enormous amount of time that they took to produce. Heck, sometimes it would take several days. By the time they were posted here, some of the stories had already been out of the news cycle for a day or two! And, there was an unintended result which I had failed to recognize for far too long. The length of those posts required an extremely long attention span by the reader, and with all the information there is for people to see on the internet, the number of dedicated viewers of this blog dropped to nearly zilch. I realized that nearly two years ago, and the competition for your eyes and attention has greatly increased since then.

While I could have discontinued this blog, that was not an option. I still believe that there is a need to try to provide information to people that may not have known about a certain news event. Also, there will be people that will find the posts here in the search engines, but that do not do Facebook. Hopefully, the audience can be widened in this way.

We'll soon find out if this works to get this blog revived.

Happy New Year!