I would like to earnestly thank all visitors to my blog. Please take this opportunity to give me feedback in the comments section, if you have any – I’ll do my best to get to it. I hope your experience at Plato’s has been both informative and enjoyable.
At this stage of the blog’s development, I will now be presenting more original articles and analysis by various bloggers and writers, as well as occasional pieces by yours truly.
I am very honored today to present you with the first writer/blogger, QuestionMark, whose first article will appear today on Plato’s. I have known QuestionMark for many years and although he has been a ‘retired’ blogger for a good 5 years, I have managed to persuade him to now come forth and share with us some of his keen insights into the middle east. QuestionMark is an expert on East-West relations and diplomacy, as well as Arab political history. He is fluent in both English and Arabic, and he daily monitors both Arab and Western media. Please feel free to pose any question to him regarding the ME – he is a generous and generously informed gentlemen.
I don’t know how long I can be doing this for, but I sure as hell am gonna enjoy the ride!
I hope you can continue to do this. You have a talent for it – and I love the artwork you choose! If you start to tire, ask for volunteers to help you. I am sure you can find many from the group you have been interacting with, both here and on MW.
Well done, Taxi!
Thanks Cloaky! It’s really a question of time for me. I’ll see how it all evolves over the next few months. And Yes I will ask for volunteers when one arm gets tired or if a ridiculously tempting other project beckons.
Even though I thoroughly enjoy doing admin work, the snag is that it does take away some of my writing time – I have limited computer time per day due to other life duties and callings.
Yes, I can imagine that this is a lot of work for one person and despite the passion for it, it probably eats into quite a bit of your life.
It’s not too shabby really, Cloak. I mange to spread it out into a morning and an evening dip, maybe a couple of minutes here and there, several times in between. About 4 hours daily all added up.
Actually putting posts up is very quick: 2-4 minutes per post, including finding artwork – without researching for artwork, it would take a few seconds to post an article up (thanks to wordpress’s tool ‘press this)’. The time-consuming activity is actually reading – reading more mainstream articles than I usually do – must read first before I post in the cause of ‘quality check’. Of course not everything I read ends up getting posted up – I feel my job is to go through the day’s headlines (hundreds of bullshit headlines!) and select articles pertinent to mine and my reader’s interests. This reading time I put in is being borrowed from my ‘writing/blogging’ time. But I feel like I’m giving editorial commentary with my visuals so I do get some kinda ‘comment satisfaction’ in a roundabout way. Heh!
I’m definitely gonna need admin partners in the next stage of the blog’s progress. So if anyone is interested, shoot me an email.
Ditto.
If the financing were available I would love to see the Plato style ME issues—US-Isr-Pal-Saudi , Etc. really expanded into some format similar to a combination of MW and Dkos where ‘sections dealing with all aspects” are set up and independent bloggers and commenters can post articles and start discussion without any length limits.
Unfortunately would be expensive to set up and host.
The lack of that kind of venue has been my complaint about the two or three orgs like CNI, IRemp and ifamericansknew—–they should combine their resources to do this and make use of and bring in independent bloggers also.
For instance the recent Summit to Reasses the US-Isr—-and ME policy is the kind of discussion that needs to be continuing and organized for a prominet place on the net to be more wide spread.
All objections and questions (and observers) surrounding USA-Isr-ME are just begging for a place to go where they can get more attention.
Its a void not being filled.
Thanks American.
Actually, if I upgrade my wordpress theme I can then have more ‘width space’ for comments and side margin archivals and other nifty ad-ons. My personal taste is to keep thing minimalist and uncluttered, but not at the expense of content, of course. It’s not really expensive at all to upgrade – But I’m just waiting a couple more months (maybe even less) to see if i can stick to doing this first. In the end, I want exactly what you want.