Tomorrow's my 2nd xangaversary, but yesterday, Dec. 18th, was actually the 2nd anniversary of Xanga going full-fledged public.  Though Xanga now, with its new .net/.aspx implementation of the "Newly Updated List" has wiped away the evidence, I was able awhile ago to establish Xanga's date of first truly public debut:

The Anciently Updated List

Here is the ancient, founding key, the Rosetta Stone, to the genesis of Xanga  as we know it.    (note of 12/19/2002: this previous link is the link that no longer works--it's now defunct!)   ...and so on...

Xanga is getting better, bigger, faster with the .net implementation and streamlining of features.  But it is also burying its past quite tracelessly.  This research above would no longer be possible today provided the current severely-limited interface accesses to searching xanga's past.  But that is just the inherent structure of blogs, isn't it--to live in the now and for the latest, if not for tomorrow? 

I'm starting to get the feeling that the typical rapid plowing over of blogs and what's considered "current" in the Blogosphere is just symptomatic of a larger growing trend to become 'history-less' (storyless?) and embrace high-velocity culture change.  "What have you done for me lately?" has transformed into "What are you doing for me now?" 

I'd bet that if Shakespeare were alive today and had blogged, by installment posts, scenes from Romeo and Juliet two years ago that they would have been HUGE at the time but today unread!  ...unless of, of course, he kept re-posting his excellent old posts--which makes a superb case for all of us to do just that with ours!

The Blogosphere Challenge: Why browse yesterday when you can help blaze tomorrow? ...

"You want pistols, hot-blooded people bent on making their mark.  Not mild mannered, conforming types who will succumb to the awesome power of the existing culture." 

"...you must hit with enough shock effect to immobilize the old culture at least temporarily."

"You must seize control of the energy-turn it to your advantage-so it can't be used to fortify and perpetuate the old culture."

"You need radicals. Rebels. Revolutionaries.  People who howl at the moon."

"...you can develop a reputation as public enemy #1 and still prevail if you have a good supporting cast."

"Start out fast and keep trying to pick up speed.  Leave skid marks. "

 from High-Velocity Culture Change , by Price Pritchett and Ron Pound,  A Handbook for Managers

The xanga-adaptation: "Leave prop marks."

For my last post, in order to broaden its exposure beyond my ‘regular’ subscribers, I employed a mild programming ruse to draw in new readers.  Hitting on entries in the ‘Newly updated Sites’ that were unknown to me,  I left them a comment, not by ‘notforprophet’ , but by a surrogate alias I’d secured a long time ago called ‘eProps’. 

Now, eProps is all kinds of fun since I get to leave eProps by eProps!  But eProps is also a very alluring site because many mucho hordes of the unknown xangan masses out there believe that eProps is xanga’s God.  It’s what they live, breath, beg, cajole, taunt, and sometimes even threaten for.   Probably no one item of xangan culture has more nicknames than eProps.  They’re referred to as propz, epills, pr0pz, ePoopiez, epropssssssss, epOppies, eprOppz, ePillz, e`p`i`l`l`z, epOps, propzz, 2pills, epRoPiEz, e`pillllllz, pilllz, and more and onwards...

So to test the suspected appeal of the eProps site, about three months ago I posted two duplicate posts—one on 'notforprophet' and one and eProps—and conducted a little experiment.  Though not exactly scientific since the controls weren’t precise, I found that, with a given amount of commenting amongst my old subscribers as 'notforprophet' and with an equal amount of commenting as 'eProps' among Newly Updated newbies unknown to me, the eProps version of the post got almost twice the responses (eProps and comments) through links-back!   Damn—eProps had more name appeal than 'notforprophet'!  Haha  So how, I pondered, could I make eProps work for me?  Maintain two correlative blogs?  Nope, too much work for me and the induced schizophrenia would make me paranoid.  Abandon 'notforprophet' and assume the mantle of eProps?  Naw…I’m too sentimental.  So…so…I got an idea…What if I were to redirect—via a javascript include—the apparently tantalizing eProps link, left as comments with the newbies, back to my very site here?  Eureka…and indeed: eProps is now nfp for visitation purposes (actually, both eProps and nfp are setup as referring aliases) !   Newbie bait.  Now, in your opinion, should I be doing this?  Is it naughty or nice?