Now this blogging is by no means a new thing but it’s recently made the news and a recent NetGuide ran quite a comprehensive guide on bloggs and blogging in NetGuide – Issue 79.
Now not being a wordsmith or journo by any stretch of the imagination, I’ll leave it to you to follow the above link and find out about bloggs.
When I first started toying with doing this, my approach to the blogging thing is to ask the question – Why? [“Why” has got to be one of my favourite questions as, with the right tone and inflection it can mean so many things – and as far as I’m concerned it’s possibly THE most valid question anyone can ever ask – you get such interesting answers too!]
The reason, I guess, differs for everyone, but the underlying premise is the same – everyone has something to say, and in the tradition of ‘Field of Dreams’ people seem have a “if we write it they will come” mentality. I’m kind of curious to see if this is true myself, so – I’ll be attempting to restrain myself from directing people to these pages (unless they hit the http://inskeep.net homepage – at which stage I figure they’re fair game).
Many of the people I discussed this with didn’t consider themselves ‘bloggers’ as such, and just consider themselves as online diary writers, for their own pleasure and that of their friends and family rather than a spectator sport for the world to enjoy. Like any fad, I
guess ‘blogging’ will pass and while the name may change, there will be those who take the time to write what they wish and publish it to the world, even if no one else is watching.
So why am I doing it? Well – as I state on the index page to this section of the site, I’m planning to use this as an exercise to research some of the stuff that interests me and put my ideas down on the page, hopefully allowing me to crystallise my thinking on some of the issues I’ve been kicking around over the years.
This isn’t going to be a (Robert X.) Cringely Column, nor is it going to be a self professed “leading source of Net-Industry news and commentary” such as the pages by the Aaardvark, it’s just going to be an exercise in jumping feet first into an idea and seeing how deep things get. As a toastmaster I already enjoy expressing my opinions verbally, so the challenge of extending this to a written form will be an interesting one indeed.