Above all else in life, I despise the huge pointless egos and the terminally self-involved persons and personalities that surround us everywhere: in politics, in entertainment, in sports, in our personal lives, and yes, on Plurk. I feel like I am wearing out my welcome for the site on which I am writing this post. I have plurked about it every day for a week or so and am sure people are getting tired of hearing about it.

When Laura and I started Plurkfood, it was supposed to be a collaborative effort of sorts. I have thousands of recipes, almost all of which I have tried, and revised and tried again. Certainly, no one is interested in those.  The idea was to rely upon our fellow plurkers to tell us what they liked to eat, and that other plurkers would be interested in that.

As long as we promoted the site, the recipes kept rolling in. When we stopped, the recipes stopped. When they stopped, the site went into a deep coma, from which it has not yet awoken, unless you count that one recipe today. We hate to bomb the timeline with plurks asking for your recipes. I also hate to let it die, if only because I still think that we had a good idea.

So, what do you think we should do?

There aren’t a lot of people reading this post, maybe 30-35 a day on average. So your feedback will stand out from the silence. Should we start it back up again? Should we beg for recipes? Should we recruit co-editors and let them have access to the site to add recipes? Should we post our own recipes and food experiences? Or should we do something completely different?

Then, for better or worse, it dawned upon me that Plurk was the perfect place for online conversations and I was writing an online monologue, instead! That philosophical conundrum made little sense to me, and my posts at Plurkiverse became less frequent, then finally just petered out altogether. I have never gotten back to writing posts for Plurkiverse, and there is the tiniest uncomfortable tingling of guilt in the back of my mind because of it.

Still, I would much rather have a conversation than perform a monologue, especially where Plurk is concerned, since the conversation can take place on what would be the object of the monologue! If you happen by to look at my numbers, you will note that I spend a bit of time on Plurk (how else could you amass almost 140,000 responses?) and any time that I write about writing about Plurk would take away from the time that I am able to spend there.

Still, there is that guilty itch. I think of things every time I am on Plurk that would make a good Plurkiverse column. Some of those things are funny or silly, some of them would wind up being very controversial, and others would be deadly serious, indeed. Some part of me wants to write those posts, and another part of me wants to leave the site to grow and evolve on its own, without even the tiny influence that I could have on that organic process. The result is that I honestly don’t know whether I should continue to write about Plurk or not.

What do you think?

Plurktalk is a weekly live video Webcast, ostensibly hosted by me but in truth made possible by a faithful group of attendees and occasional visits from other Plurkers. Sometimes we even talk about Plurk on Plurktalk. More often, it is the lives of the people in attendance and the vital matters of the day, with a liberal dose of (sometimes) bawdy humor.

Regulars, just now, include @pritcharddesign, @andex, @Lchamp, @HighDef, @planetKnit, @Willfall, and @nethead, who has been missing a lot lately due to family health issues, plus @bigdoc, who has had a lot of over-the-road and drunken debauchery issues. Over the time that we have been doing the show, there have been a largish number of other plurkers that have been on the show, especially when you consider the family tree of shows which preceded Plurktalk and in which I was involved.

The show occurs on Stickam, which results in some challenges. Some people have a hard time getting in sometimes, others occasionally get flung out into cyberspace in the middle of a sentence. But it is the best group videoconferencing software that I have found for free. There are windows for six live video feeds from participants and a chat window for those that choose not to be on camera or mic. The interaction level is high.

When I first started, we tried to hold the show to an hour in length. As I relaxed the format, it grew to two hours or a little more. Lately it has been running later and later. The show last night went until 2:30 in the morning, my time, for a total length of 6.5 hours. We covered approximately 4,826,081 subjects during that time and people typed or spoke about that many funny lines. We also talked about some serious things, as we almost always do.

If you would like to watch a Plurktalk, feel free to come to stickam.com/Plurktalk at about 8:00 Central time any Wednesday. If you want to participate, and you are very welcome to do so, join stickam and send a friend request to user Plurktalk. Remember to let me know how I know you. This is all free, by the way. None of it costs anyone anything, and most would agree that it’s worth the money.

For updates, watch Plurkiverse.com.