My pleasure, Vincent!

You put in a lot of hard work to provide a whole network of valuable sites, you deserve recognition!

Thanks to Jean-Pierre, Jose, and Vincent for taking time out of your very busy schedules to contribute here. I have come to know all of you and know that your time is a very valuable commodity!

There is an old saying in the media business—freedom of the press is limited to those who own a press. The Internet in general and the World Wide Web in particular have made that old saying largely obsolete. For better or worse, anyone with an internet connection, now widely available for free in everything from cafés to Interstate rest stops, can broadcast information to the entire world instantly. Even tyrants tremble before Twitter, as evidenced during the Iranian elections.

We are fortunate to have an ever-growing community of writers involved in covering and exploring Egyptology and the news related to that field. Note that I did not refer to us as “bloggers,” as I notice nobody else did above! I am increasingly finding that work irksome, for a variety of reasons I will not get into here. Suffice it to say that if you are spending more than an hour on an entry, citing sources, and bothering to find relevant visual media that is public domain or under a Creative Commons license, or actually producing your own photos and graphics, then you have gone above and beyond blogging.

There is another old saying in the media business—never make an enemy of someone who buys ink by the barrel. This has also been made largely passé by the Internet Age. For a relatively small investment you can spread your words to the Four Corners, and keep them there more or less permanently. As a part of the so-called “new media” we help keep checks and balances on those who fall within the domain of our interest, namely, Egyptology. This is where our independence serves us—nobody can threaten to revoke our permit to excavate, or to rattle our editor’s cage.

Tyrants beware!