The E-Sylum:  Volume 10, Number 32, August 12, 2007, Article 20

THE E-SYLUM: A NUMISMATIC BLOG?

Dick Johnson writes: "The headline stated “The Blog Turns 10” in my
morning newspaper. Blogs have been around for a decade! Can you believe
it? The article tells me there are more than 53.1 million individual
blogs now – on every conceivable subject -- and 175,000 new blogs
are created every day!

"But I am glad there is a blog on numismatics, and numismatic literature.
Or, perhaps you do not consider E-Sylum a blog, editor Wayne Homren's
personal blog. Unlike the gossip, politics, and shear running off of
the mouth – there is now a word for this “blogorhea”—that you will find
on most other web postings, I am certain you will agree what you read
here every week is a cut above anything else on the Internet.

"Wayne Homren was a visionary. Look at the first line in this issue. It
says vol 10, number 32.  Wayne envisaged many years ago what a weekly
discourse of news, announcements, gripes, comments and discourse on
numismatics would find an audience on the Internet. Way ahead of its
time. He has found that audience. He has built a readership based on
the freshness, quality, importance and service to his subscribers by
providing numismatic information we all wanted. And he has maintained
that every week since.

"As a high school senior in 1946 I could not get enough news of
numismatics in the then existing publications (Numismatist, Numismatic
Scrapbook). So I subscribed to a newspaper clipping service for any
news clipping on coins. For a class in journalism that year I wrote a
paper “Establishing a numismatic news service.” This came about, somewhat,
14 years later when I started Coin World. So you see I have some insight
of the subject.

"I recognized Wayne was on to something when I first learned of E-Sylum.
He foresaw the Internet as an effective way of publishing without paper,
print and mailing. It comes to us every Monday on our computer screen.

"No, I don't consider E-Sylum a blog. To me it is an Internet newsletter.
Make that a Newsletter with a capital N."

[I often call The E-Sylum a blog when explaining to people outside the
hobby what I do with my spare time – it's a popular term and most people
know what it means now.  But it think Dick's right – The E-Sylum not
exactly a blog.  From the start it was a newsletter - an email newsletter.
Now that we've grown into having a web archive and RSS feed, it looks
and acts a lot more like a blog, but it holds to its newsletter roots.
Many thanks to all E-Sylum readers for your interest and participation.
It's reader input that really differentiates The E-Sylum from a "mere"
blog, which is typically a one-way publishing street.  -Editor]

Dick adds: "I say I write at least one article a week for an Internet
Newsletter.  People seem to understand that.  Perhaps it is time to
put 'Newsletter' as a subhead somehow."

[Instead of “an electronic publication of the Numismatic Bibliomania
Society.”, I guess we could be more specific and label it “an online
newsletter.”   It's not just email since we have an RSS feed as well;
both forms qualify as “online”.  If you know what "RSS" is, you can
use the following address to set up The E-Sylum in your RSS feed
reader:  http://coinbooks.org/feed.xml . -Editor]

  Wayne Homren, Editor

	coinbooks.org Web

The Numismatic Bibliomania Society is a non-profit organization 
promoting numismatic literature. See our web site at coinbooks.org.

To submit items for publication in The E-Sylum, write to the Editor 
at this address: whomren@coinlibrary.com

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