Way back before blogging existed I had a geocities site. This was like, 8th grade mind you. I had some sections, video games was the big one, but opinions was another. It still exists on-line somewhere, but I can’t find it with google. Some of my friends found it a few years back. I wrote some pretty crazy stuff back in those days. I still host the final incarnation of the video game site on this server though, it wasn’t half bad, and it still gets hits oddly enough.
Anyway, when I got to college I stopped web-siting a lot and moved to slashdot journalizing. It was much easier and provided a pretty steady readership flowing from my list of fans on slashdot. But I only wrote in it when I had something to say.
Later I found that journal to be too restrictive. I couldn’t put pictures or music or sounds inside the blog posts, and I couldn’t change the way it looked. So I started this blog with blosxom. It started out as just a replacement for the slashdot journal, but with more freedom. I still only wrote in it when I had something to say. To my surprise I never really took much advantage of the added freedom I got by hosting the blog myself instead of using the slashjournal. Maybe when I figure out how to get pictures off my phone without selling my soul to verizon and I do some interesting stuff I can do something like that.
But today, something strange happened. I found myself trying to think of something to write in the blog. This is very unusual, since I only write in it when I have something to say. This can be quite often, but usually it’s only when events and discussions cause an idea to swim in my head for an extended period of time and I have to let it loose. And of course, the result is the post you see here. I was trying to think of something to say, recognized that I don’t want to get into that situation, then all of a sudden had something to say.
So anyway, soon I’m going to update the technology of this blog. First I want to make sure that trackbacks are really working. Then I’m going to set up the technorati tags and the anti-spam rel=nofollow tags. Then I think I’ll exchange my current anti-spam filter for something higher quality like the mtblacklist. Then I think I might slightly change the format of the blog. I make frequents posts to place like /., kur05hin, etc. And some of them are quality enough to be blog posts. I might just cross-post them in the blog in their own categories, but I don’t know if this is useful or not. I think of all the stuff I’ve written on /. and most of it is disappeared or deep in the depths where it will never be seen again. Maybe somehow if I saved it in my blog too it would be safe. I guess that’s more for me than for anyone who actually reads this. But I think that is a fundamental aspect of blogging that is necessary and makes it separate from journalism. Journalism is writing specifically for others. You publish it because you want other people to read it, you made it for them. With blogging you make it for yourself, and if anyone else happens to want to read it you make it available to them. I think that is what makes it special.
