At first, it looks like a blog. It has all of the things you’d expect to see in a blog; you’ve written witty social commentary, cataloged your TV watching adventures, linked to that hilarious video you saw on digg.com, and look! there at the bottom of the post! It even has a box for me to leave my own earnest reflections on your post about the evolution of Hello Kitty packaging as it relates to the self-reflexive modification of Japanese culture by Japanese culture. I comment away. I write 6 full paragraphs pointing out how, in your ignorance, you’ve completely overlooked how influential the South Korean youth counter-culture was in modifying Japanese identity in the late 1990’s.

And then, the deception begins. Because you see, dear Xanga blogger, you aren’t actually interested in my comments on your blog post. You’re only interested in the comments of other Xanga users.

Please tell me, dear Xanga users, why you make me register for a Xanga account before I can leave a comment? I have no interest in forming a relationship with Xanga. I’m only interested in what you have to say about Iago as the literary precursor to Emperor Palpatine. Why did you invite a third party to sit in on our dinner conversation? A third party that I don’t know, who may or may not steal my credit card and sell my identity to thugs and gangsters?

I don’t want to give Xanga my email address. I don’t want to have to click through three pages of verification, a captcha bot check, and click an email verification link in order to leave my comment because, frankly, by the time you make me do all of that, I no longer care enough about your original point to comment.

My friends, as long as you stay in the walled-off blogging ghetto of the Xanga-verse, your contributions to the ongoing world-wide project to translate the Firefly series into Klingon (tlhIngan Hol, not Klinonaase, which is only used by heretics and fools) will forever be marginalized. You are being left out of the conversation.

If anyone out there in the Xanga-verse would like to escape the evil clutches of their cruel oppressors, into the beauty and openness of WordPress, I would be more that happy to help you make the transition.* You can switch over to the free hosting at WordPress.com, or I can show you how to setup your own blog at a domain you own, like DanielSemsenIsAwesome.com. Either way.

Please, I beg of you. Come join us out here in the blog-o-verse. It’s infinitely better than the Xanga-verse.

*(Unfortunately, whatever half-blind monkey coded the Xanga RSS feeds decided to do a Xangatastic job, and ignore most of the header standards. This means that there is no clean way to export a Xanga blog into another blogging platform yet. There are several people in the WordPress development community working on a solution, but every time they get close, the xangatastic code monkey decides to change how the feed is constructed.)