No New York Times Book Review coverage here this weekend, though you can find some at HTML Giant, where they seem to have picked up my weekend habit. I'm busy moving this website to a new host and new software platform. The data migration heavy lifting is now complete, which means I can now start in on the fun stuff: new navigation features, an updated design, bringing my game into the new decade. Goodbye WordPress (you treated me well) ... hello Drupal.

1. Thank you to my generous readers for allowing me to workshop my memoir on this site during the full course of this year. I quietly announced this project last December, and when I look back at my initial announcement I see how much my concept has evolved since then. For one thing, I originally conceived it as a 15-year memoir (1993 to 2008), but at about the halfway point I realized that the story would have a perfect arc if I ended it at 2003.

It's now four years since I began reviewing the New York Times Book Review. A look back at my very first installment leaves me embarrassed, because I clearly did not understand the Book Review well and had little to offer beyond a negative comparison to the Velvet Underground's song "Sunday Morning" (a reference point I have, by now, completely milked dry).

A TechCrunch article titled Why Advertising is Failing on the Internet is making the rounds this morning with a bold claim that the much-hyped advertising model for web-based content is doomed to fail. Eric Clemons offers some good ideas in this piece, but his basic premise doesn't make much sense to me. Here on LitKicks, even as the economy spirals around us, I've been having a pretty good year.

In January 2009 I began writing a memoir of my decade and a half in the Internet industry by blogging a new chapter each week. Here, still untitled, is a life in progress:

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Chapter One: THE BREAK



Summer 1993: why I was working on Wall Street; a co-worker alerts me to the existence of the Internet.

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LitKicks has been inviting poets to submit their work for public review and response since 2001. 2008 was a lively year for "Action Poetry" -- a few writers have become new regulars, and many excellent newcomers have dropped in as well. We hope regulars and newcomers will keep up the good work in 2009. Here is a random display of some of the best poems from 2008.

1. I used to review a lot of poetry chapbooks on LitKicks. I really loved doing that, but then more and more chapbooks started coming in the mail and I couldn't figure out what to do with them. One day I looked at a stack of chapbooks by my front door and realized I'd just been stacking them there for the last few months. I hadn't opened a single one.

Now that's teamwork. Google is indexing LitKicks again, after John Honeck and a few other experts pitched in with helpful advice. It turns out the reason I couldn't see the spam links is that they were programmed to appear only in response to page requests from Google or other major search engines. The secret was to look at a cached LitKicks page from another search engine, which clearly showed the spam. Thanks also to Google for quickly restoring the site once the problem was solved.