I finally worked up the gumption to start blogging. I’ve been lurking in the blogosphere for many months now, starting with Howard Rheingold’s blog, shortly thereafter discovering Anne Galloway’s blog, and through them (and others), many, many more. I don’t expect to rise to the level of keen observation, insight and inspiration that Howard, Anne and many other bloggers regularly achieve, but I wanted to at least experience the world from a blogger’s point of view … and, thereby, finally be able to wear an “I’m blogging this” tee shirt (in good conscience).
There are other incentives, of course. Mike Perkowitz and I are exploring, in a project called Blogger Bridges, how the digital content in people’s blogs might provide fodder for awareness and interaction within the physical spaces they co-inhabit, extending some recent work on proactive displays beyond the realm of conferenceland. Up until now, this has been a largely hypothetical investigation for me; it can now become a bona fide first-person (plural) project.
Another factor is my need for better memory augmentation. I read, think and write (not necessarily in that order) and store the results of this in a variety of representations (neural, ink, bits) and formats (documents, email messages, presentations). My goal is to make this blog a central repository, at least for the high order bits, so that I always know where to go … and where to direct people who might be interested. In fact, if more and more people adopt blogging as a primary means for storing and sharing their thoughts, I can imagine a pithy new response to “How are ya?” queries entering the vernacular: RTFB (“read the f***ing blog” — along the lines of RTFM).
Having decided to take up blogging, I struggled for a long time with deciding upon an appropriate name for this blog. I don’t think that I’ve arrived at an optimal name, but I think it is good enough (Voltaire’s view that “the best is the enemy of the good” comes to mind). I also considered a variety of blogging tools and communities. Mike is a long-time LiveJournaler, but recently created a new technology-focused blog using MovableType. My colleague, Ian Smith, uses TypePad for his blog and argued persuasively for this platform. Another factor in my decision was my recent discovery that Gina is studying LiveJournal (as are others) and yet chose TypePad as a host for her own blog. Another factor has been my observations in Gene Becker’s blog of his [erstwhile?] crusade to encourage various people to blog — while Gene never specifically encouraged me about blogging, his entreaties to others struck me as compelling (and perhaps provide evidence for the potential impact of blogs). There have been other factors, of course, but this is already getting long.
So here I am, and here I’ll be, posting material that will be less self-indulgent, more focused on [other] people, places and things. Although I’m doing this primarily for self-serving reasons, I will be delighted if any of the material I post here makes a broader contribution, and welcome comments (and trackbacks) on form, content, tone or whatever.