“Before the Internet, before BBSes and Fidonet and Usenet and LiveJourn...” — Patrick Nielsen Hayden Quote

Before the Internet, before BBSes and Fidonet and Usenet and LiveJournal and blogs and Facebook and Twitter, before the World Wide Web and hot-and-cold-online-everything, science fiction fandom had a long-lived, robust, well-debugged technology of social networking and virtual community.

Personally, I always find it especially piquant when cultural conservatives, usually quick to profess their devotion to the Free Market, rail against the success in said market of some product of which they disapprove.

Back in 2008, when we were first preparing to launch Tor.com, I knew I wanted Jo Walton to be a regular writer for the site.

As a senior editor at Tor Books and the manager of our science fiction and fantasy line, I rarely blog to promote specific projects I'm involved with, for reasons that probably don't need a lot of explanation.

Cory Doctorow should be too busy for lunch. He's co-editor of, and a prolific contributor to, one of the most influential blogs in the world, Boing Boing. Over the past decade the Canadian-born writer has published 16 books, mostly science fiction novels. He campaigns vigorously on the politics of the digital age.

I follow all these fashion blogs that are cool and inspire me. I'm not really obsessed with anyone except for the people that I like romantically. I get excited when they post. Sometimes I like to stalk my exes.

In a way, publishing in 2005 was similar to publishing in 1950. Nobody kept blogs; that was still optional. I didn't even have a website then.

Much of the lifeblood of blogs is search engines - more than half the traffic for most blogs.