Dusting this thing off

I was thinking about my history as a blogger, back to 2000 when I made my first blog – by hand. That didn’t last long. Manually coding everything and archiving was a pain. Then along came Livejournal, which I was on constantly. I made some awesome relationships with those people, and got to meet a good number of them in life. I think I really got into LJ at the time because I had been laid off of IBM and had about a years worth of time to be unemployed and hanging out on the internet. At first it was blogging about myself and every mundane thing, but then it became about building relationships in the community. After a while, I stopped blogging because really, I felt like what everyone else was blogging about was more interesting, and I didn’t feel the need to just add to the noise. I still feel that way today, to a degree. Though, I think if I had anything to blog about, it would be work, and I’m not sure that it would be appropriate given the content that i’d have in mind.  

These days, it’s still about community, and communication, and making relationships, but the medium for me has become social networking, and social media. Blogging is rampant now, and there’s LOTS of noise. More interestingly, I feel like relationships can be built and maintained via new social sites like Facebook, and more recently, Twitter. Twitter feels like a nice go between blogging, and sharing minutae. I feel like bloggers are more focused and intentional now about a well thought out post, rather than a list of what they did that day, and what music they’re listening to. That’s what Twitter is for: microblogging. You’ve got 140 characters, tell me what you’re doing RIGHT NOW, and sometimes that can be more interesting than a diatribe on your crazy co-workers.

Anyway, I’m not sure where I was going with all of that, save to say that because Facebook covers social networking, and Twitter covers microblogging, that it might be nice to come back here and  write out some expanded ideas that don’t fit in either one of those places as well. As always, I have lots of ambitions, but we’ll see how many of them actually come to fruition. This seems as good a start as any.