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esterday, C-SM had what I believe is its best day since I started blogging four years ago (my first post* was on October 18, 2004). I doubt if five people read that post, but yesterday C-SM got 1,386 hits and 1,786 page views. I’m humbled and grateful.

* Looking back at that first post, I’m pretty proud of what I wrote. It is as applicable as McCain and Obama race to the finish as it was in the final days of Bush/Kerry:

A Purposeful Presidency

A life purpose isn’t built overnight. It is formed early and grows slowly, nurtured by feedback and strengthened by milestones in passion, pain, achievement and failure. The president of the only superpower on the planet should understand his purpose with clarity and pursue it with integrity.

President Bush may not always understand how mind, larynx and mouth are supposed to work together; he my frighten timid Europeans with his assured, straightforward beliefs, but he certainly understands his purpose. When the 757s hit the Twin Towers, his entire lifetime — early exposure to world politics, youthful misadventures, mid-life conversion, private and public sector work — congealed into a fierce purpose: to protect American democracy, world democracy, from terrorist repressors of life, libery and happiness.

And Senator Kerry? His purpose is to be president. Beyond that, clarity fogs. The mist may be the result of his 20-year Senate career, where passion, pain, achievement and purpose were dulled by Senatorial privilege, three re-election campaigns and two remarkable successes at gold-digging. His lack of purpose is evident in his record; his staff’s insistence on 59 bills in a 20-year career is both pathetic and false, and not a single piece of Kerry legislation is the result of a long-term passion for anything but pandering to the electorate.

This November, vote with a purpose.

Amen.

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‘m writing this in my usual spot in the kitchen nook, the good Lord having returned our little expedition safely home. The last day was like the others in that I was completely, blessedly, out of the news loop with VP selections not even approaching my consciousness. Lucky me. But it was entirely unlike the other days, as well: One of high-tailing it down a freeway, not arcing through curves along the shore and through the redwoods. Out of the foggy forests we flew, across wine country, through a traffic-choked San Francisco, into the Silicon Valley, on a flight, and home.

But against that benign backdrop is this: I will shortly reveal Bookworm‘s identity. The secretive Bay Area conservative blogger has been masked for far too long!

But first, a tale prefaced by this: Incredible Daughter #1 is a serious BMW fanatic. She tracks her Z4 at various raceways, regularly goes to meets and drives with other BMW owners, and is a moderator at Bimmerforums, a very popular BMW page. So yesterday, when the drive turned out to be less engaging than on the earlier days and we found the conversation lacking, we made the simple decision to play “spot the German car.”

Even including Volkswagens (think VW bus in NorCal) the pickings were few, and after 20 or so challenging minutes, our count was around five. A VW or two, an old and a middle-aged Mercedes, a BMW 3 series. Then after a long-ish dry spell, we came down a hill and onto a straightaway through a little, picturesque farming valley, when suddenly there appeared a vision: A glorious 1930s vintage burgundy and cream BMW roadster. This is almost certainly the same car, from a photo I found of a 2004 vintage BMW rally.

It was immediately followed by a silver 507, a 1950s era luxury sportscar BMW put up against the Mercedes gull-wing coupe. It almost put BMW into bankruptcy, but is achingly beautiful and technologically hyper-advanced. It was easily worth $500,000 and who even knows what the vintage roadster would command.

Incredible Daughter #1 was making sounds I’d never heard from her before: Squeals, screams and ooohs strung together in a very easily understood if not particularly well articulated expression of delight and shock. There followed another classic roadster from the 30s, plus various newer models. The count of German cars soared to the teens, and the rest of the game, which ended in the 50s as we approached the wealthy Bay Area, was a let-down.

It turned out we had stumbled upon the BMW Vintage & Classic Car Club of America’s Aptos to Eureka to Tahoe to Aptos rally. Read more here.

Discounting the visit with Bookworm, which I’ll get to next, the next most exciting thing was seeing a Prius – a Prius! - in Marin County – Marin County! – with a McCain bumper sticker on it. Albeit, a small one, but still …

So we (Incredible Daughters #1 and #3 and me) carried out our stealth meeting with the secretive proprietress of Bookworm Room in a coffee shop somewhere in Marin County. She is delightful, as expected. We had a wide-ranging discussion on everything from history (she’s reading about Einstein, I’m reading about the American West) to stealth conservatism, to raising kids and how acorns may or may not fall far from the tree. Talking to Bookworm is something of a cross between electroshock therapy and a perfect hot fudge sundae. Your brain gets quite a work-out, but it’s a fabulously indulgent pleasure. Blogging can make a good friend out of someone you’ve never even met – and I see the feeling was mutual.

So why would I destroy Bookworm’s confidentiality and expose her secret identity? Why would I put my blogfriend at risk of negative social stigma, of being treated like a leper in her home town?

It’s simple, really: Once a journalist, always a journalist. You really can’t trust me with a secret.

Besides, what right does she have to write about public persona while keeping her own persona secret? The public has a right to know her identity that overpowers her right to keep her identity secret.

And no, it doesn’t matter one whit that the public will not benefit much at all from the considerable harm I’m about to cause her. The only important thing is the relentless rush of knowledge, and knowing her identity is just one more piece of the puzzle; one of little consequence purchased at great price for sure, but I’m willing to hurt her in the name of the public’s right to know.

So,

without further delay,

here is a photo of me

with the until no longer unrevealed

Bookworm:

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We have Tunku Varadarajan at the WSJ to thank for the best weekend reading in the Blogosphere this weekend, as he notes that this place we increasingly call home is now a decade old:

We are approaching a decade since the first blogger — regarded by many to be Jorn Barger — began his business of hunting and gathering links to items that tickled his fancy, to which he appended some of his own commentary. On Dec. 23, 1997, on his site, Robot Wisdom, Mr. Barger wrote: “I decided to start my own webpage logging the best stuff I find as I surf, on a daily basis,” and the Oxford English Dictionary regards this as the primordial root of the word “weblog.”

The dating of the 10th anniversary of blogs, and the ascription of primacy to the first blogger, are imperfect exercises. Others, such as David Winer, who blogged with Scripting News, and Cameron Barrett, who started CamWorld, were alongside the polemical Mr. Barger in the advance guard. And before them there were “proto-blogs,” embryonic indications of the online profusion that was to follow. But by widespread consensus, 1997 is a reasonable point at which to mark the emergence of the blog as a distinct life-form.

It’s fitting that blogs have an uncertain birthdate because blogs are nothing if not unanchored. Critics who question the viability of blogs because of their uncertifiability ignore two things: Blogs self correct rather viciously, and certifiability only goes so far in opinion and news; we’re not building bridges and levees here, so the margin for error is somewhat greater.

Varadarajan solicited brief essays from a number of bloggers and viewers/critics of bloggers. They’re mostly quite interesting and worth a jaunt over to read their stuff. I thought I would quote from Tom Wolfe or Newt Gingrich, but of all the commentators, it was Xiao Qiang,right, founder of China Digital Times, who homered. Here, in full, is his piece, and why blogs have changed the world:

Lian Yue started his blog in the spring of 2005. A free-lance columnist, Lian lives in Xiamen, one of China’s most wealthy cities on the southeast coast. His liberal-style social commentary and humorous writing quickly won him thousands of readers.

Starting this March, Lian posted a series of articles warning the people in his hometown that a paraxylene (PX) chemical factory being built in his city could have a disastrous environmental impact. He called on residents to speak out against the construction. “Don’t be afraid,” Lian wrote on his blog on March 29. “Please just talk to your friends, family and colleagues about this event. They might still be in the dark.”

Lian is one of 16 million (and growing) active bloggers in China. While most posts are personal, an increasing number of bloggers writing about public affairs have become opinion leaders in their local communities. Despite the government’s “Great Firewall” to filter out “undesirable information,” and the tens of thousands of personnel hired to police the Internet, the sheer number of bloggers writing about public affairs is having a transformative impact on Chinese politics.

Xiamen authorities have vigorously deleted anti-PX factory messages on any servers within their governing territory. However, word still got out to local residents via email, IM and SMS on mobile phones. One of Lian Yue’s articles on this topic was published in a newspaper in a neighboring province and spread “like wildfire” throughout the blogosphere. By the end of May, SMS messages and cellphone photos of protesting slogans such as “Boycott PX, Protect Xiamen” were sent out to millions of Xiamen residents. On June 1 and 2, against the local authorities’ warning, several thousand citizens spontaneously showed up “to walk” in front of the city government with anti-PX message boards. Participants reported the protest live with their cellphones, which directly transmitted photos and text to their blogs.

The government was forced to announce a “re-evaluation” of the factory construction.

In China, blogs enable millions of citizens to express their opinions with reduced political risk simply because of the sheer number of like-minded opinions online. Facing these independent voices, the old ideological machine starts to crumble. Within society, bloggers like Lian Yue are seen as more credible voices than propaganda officials. The Chinese blogosphere is a dynamically contested terrain. What will the long-term implications be? I think the writing is already on the Great Firewall.

Against that, Tom Wolfe’s’ effete discounting of blogs for being inaccurate and Chris Cox’s piece on their effect on investing are merely interesting. Xiao reaffirmed why blogs give us hope.

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It’s the next big thing from the dot-com realm — blogging via mobile phone, brought to you by a company called Twitter:

Silicon Valley is abuzz over a new mini-blogging service for mobile phones that some predict will be a mass-market hit with the reach of a YouTube or MySpace.

Over the past two weeks, Twitter has attracted the sort of hyperbole the Valley reserves for its next internet darling – though such self-reinforcing adulationalso led to dotcom mania. …

“This is the first application that people have got excited about since Flickr came out,” said Ross Mayfield, a Valley entrepreneur, comparing it to a popular photo-sharing site bought by Yahoo in 2005. “I don’t think it will be the next YouTube – but I do think it will gain wide adoption,” he said.

Users of Twitter post short messages – up to 140 characters – that can be viewed either on a website or on mobile phones. “Twitter probably wouldn’t have existed before blogging, when people learned to be more transparent,” Mr Mayfield added.

Though launched publicly last summer, use of Twitter started to take off in the middle of March after it was adopted by tech­nology bloggers attending the South by Southwest conference in Texas. (MSNBC)

Twitter’s a great name for the product, despite the risky nickname alluded to in my headline. The 140-word limit would be a challenge even for short attention span posters like me — but in this new “share all” world we live in, teenage twits may be Twittering about their lives even more than they are today with MySpace and YouTube.

I’m not sure that means civilization and humankind will advance.

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