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Sayonara, Suite101.com

© Lance Lindley

I've decided to stop writing the Japan article for Suite101. I just can't scrape up the time anymore. When I started, I was single, childless and on shore duty. Now I have a wife and soon-to-be-2-year-old son and I'm running the public affairs office and print shop on America's only permanently forward deployed aircraft carrier, USS Kitty Hawk (CV63). I just don't have the passion for the topic anymore to devote what's left of my free time to the articles. I was hanging on by my nails until the stock options vested, but now that they have, the stock is trading at 25% of the option price and I just don't believe it's coming back, so there is no longer even that motivation to keep me struggling along.

I'll remain a Suite101 member. I still think it's a cool idea, and the team at iFive has worked hard to keep the site from outgrowing its functionality.

It's kind of odd that I ever got involved to begin with, because I stumbled on Suite101 by accident. It was back in March 1998 and I was searching for something or other on a search engine. One of the results led me to a completely unrelated site with an article about pen-and-paper roleplaying games. I read the article and emailed the author to comment on it. He responded that the article was more than a year old and said "I haven't written for Suite101 for almost a year now." I went back to his site to find out what this "Suite101" business was, and found out that it was -- ironically enough -- an alternative to the randomness of search engines. Instead of getting overwhelmed with results that are ranked in any number of irrelevant ways, Suite101 sought to provide a community of topic experts who would present only the best links, ranked by quality.

I read up on it and thought it would be a great way to vent my passion for Japanese history and culture.

Back then, there were less than 200 topics which were all listed right on the front page. The gardening topics ruled the realm back then and I couldn't crack the top 100 in page hits (they used to rank them back then). Several versions later the site looks great and has some fantastic functions, but it has more of a "big city" feel than the old community feeling it used to have (much as Geocities went from having "neighborhoods" with little houses on streets that were the front doors to the various sites, and now is just another faceless repository of free webspace). I really like what they've done with Suite101... the new look is attractive and very functional. It just makes me feel a lot smaller than it used to, even though my page hits have grown along with the site.