Self. Published.
Witness my triumphant attempt at blogging. Gasp and suck the air!
Perhaps I am something of a late bloomer. Perhaps I am overly cautious. Whatever the reason, I am certainly late to the blogging party. Or some would say I missed it completely!
Wired Magazine’s Paul Boutin writes that blogs are “so 2004″ in a recent story about the death of blogging. With Facebook, Twitter, and other social sites, does it really make sense to try and keep track of friends’ lives by reading their blogs? Maybe not. But perhaps the funeral march for blogging can wait a while, at least until I explain why I’m writing this blog.
Jeffery Zeldman, web standards guru, has a few scathing comments regarding Boutin’s article. After pointing out the ridiculous nature of Boutin’s overblown arguments, Zeldman gets serious for a second and makes a point that I like:
“When do we stop reducing the web to a vulgar and trivial competition between head boys, and start appreciating it as a maturing medium for real thought and expression?”
True that, Mr. Zeldman. I mean, that is basically what my sister says about her blog but in a different way. First she warns that she thinks people are too self-centered, which I agree with completely. (Think of how people build themselves personal shrines where at they can praise and worship themselves, spending hours honing their online profiles.)
But my sister decided to take on blogging anyway after being inspired by some of that “real thought and expression” stuff. She read her nephew’s blog chronicling his experiences fighting cancer with the support of his young wife. Try using Twitter or Facebook to do that!
Over the past year or so, I have spent a good deal of time reading the archives of personal blogs, mostly from design professionals I admire, and soaking in a wealth of knowledge, while gaining a sense of history and community. These archives alone are valuable enough to make the idea of blogs being obsolete pretty laughable.
So, in my own attempt to record my thoughts and express myself in a venue that gives me the freedom to write lengthy posts when I so choose, I am starting a blog. My lateness to blogging can perhaps be made up for in my attempt to make the posts here good enough to justify being longer than Twitter’s 140 characters.
I am certainly not planning on writing anything so profound or inspirational as a struggle with cancer, and I will more likely than not bore people who do not share my same personal and professional interests. But I do hope to find my own voice and put my two cents “out there” for whatever they may be worth.
We’ll see if this blog proves successful for my purposes, which will remain known only to me until I decide whether or not I can trust you, dear reader.