I do think all this time on the Internet with blogs etc. is serving a crucially important function: its as though we are all synapses in an evolving superhuman intelligence that is gathering facts and thinking about solutions. Look at the way the TOD community hashed out the topic of corn ethanol and its pros/cons, that was the work of a group intelligence more capable than any of its individual components.

It takes a lot of time spent gathering info, commenting and writing on the part of the individual synapses (this means you) in order to keep that group intelligence humming.

In fact, I believe that this is our only hope of survival as we face this century's converging crises.

In the past human civilizations have usually failed to ward off crises of resource depletion, largely because of the short-term-oriented limited-horizon thinking that Nate has often written about here.

IMO the crucial difference between us and our ancestors is the way we have developed new media technologies to tie our brains together and think better than we can individually. This is the only thing that has really changed about us since literacy developed, perhaps it will enable us to avoid a similar fate to our predecessors.

Personally I'm not sure if this emerging global networked intelligence we have been creating since the 90s is going to be enough to figure out the problems and find workable solutions that don't involve mass die-off...however its the only hope we have.

So keep blogging don't give up!

Also have to add -- I would imagine that at least here on TOD, many of us have significantly altered our activities in the real world because of the information we've learned here, am I wrong?

I recently made the most important financial decision of my life (NOT buying an overpriced house at the height of the bubble) precisely because of all the info I've gathered from hours of blogsurfing every day. Had I not understood what was going on and followed the advice of the real estate industry, we would have bought a tremendously overpriced house and lost everything we had in the ensuing downturn.

So for me personally at least, all these hours of reading blogs has paid off massively in helping me to avoid disaster...