Also laughable was the e-mail I got today from an enterprise that would like me to pay them to publish my writing. What's up with that? Do I look like a moron? I'm clearly already publishing my writing since they found me on the Web. The deal is they ask you to pay for the privilege of submitting articles or poetry (though the first one's free) to their site, and then if they accept it and publish it everyone votes on the published stuff. If you gain enough points you get $10 which presumably comes out of your own pocket with the money you ante'd up. They're not making money on it, so at least they're not venal, but they act like it's a big opportunity. I think it's ludicrous.

In that same vein, I heard from a person who was starting a new web ring and invited me to join it. She was trying to "unite the journal community" and promised her ring would not discriminate against anyone. Hellooooo, we already have Yahoo's Online Journal listings, Open Pages and Diarist.net, and dozens of web rings with no guidelines whatsoever. Why on earth would merely listing the entire fluid population of diarists unite them? There's no greater community binder than focusing on specific interests in common, such as gardening or auto racing, or banding together to fight some perceived threat to the community, such as property development or AOL buying ICQ. I'm a big fan of selection, focus, refinement. If anything, journalists benefit from being in small groups where they have a chance of being read.

I think it's a fine idea, promoting writing and all that. I go in for a bit of that myself. But I object to some of the approaches I've seen lately. They just don't seem to be very well thought out. I have strong views on what makes a community, and I don't think you can create them out of whole cloth. I think you have to weave them, choosing and blending.

Discrimination is a very useful tool. It goes hand in hand with taste, an excellent virtue to develop.

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