My first "blog" (Randy's Journal) ran from 1997 - 2002.

If you are astute on web history, you'll realize that '97 was well before blogging tools were invented and a couple of years before the term "blog" was coined.  Back then, to have one's own website was to be a pioneer.  Each of us was exploring what a website could be and what impact it could have.  There was no right answer.  We were inventing.

 

My web presence back then reflected my aquarium hobby:  My website republished my articles that had been printed.  Before Wikipedia existed, I started writing descriptive pages, each dedicated to a species of fish.  Before eBay, I experimented with an online auction of fish that I raised from a spawn.  Once I started traveling to speak across the country, I posted my schedule of upcoming dates and summaries of events past. And to share about what was happening in my fishroom or what thoughts I was thinking, I posted dated entries under Randy's journal.  Back in the '90s, each of these was an experimental invention - before we had proven and prominent examples to lead us.

Randy's Journal looked a lot like the blogs of today.  Entries were always titled and assigned a date.  Each new entry was added on top so that the string of entries would read from most recent to older.  I would always try to add photos within or along side the text to add interest and illustration.  But in the pre-blog era I didn't have any blogging tools, so I would hand code each entry and pre-size and position each photo.  Posting formatted content to web pages was a manual process and only a few of us could do it.  For better or for worse, today's blogging tools makes it so easy to create and publish a blog that more people have blogs than those who have something new or important to say.

According to Wikipedia, earlier this year there were over a quarter of a billion published blogs just from Tumblr and Wordpress alone.  I'm sure most of those are abandoned and I suspect most of those are just noise (postings with no valuable content).  Make it so easy that anyone can create a blog and almost anyone will.  For better or worse, that's the way it has become.

Over the past several years I've forged lots of thoughts that I wish I'd recorded - ideas that I thought were novel and worth sharing.  As each of these formed, some gut feeling wanted to write these down and share them.  But I have not had a blog-like platform running for over a decade.  I kept saying "soon."  Well, it's late 2014, I'm as deep into web technology as I've ever been, and I think it's time to start a new personal website so I can post and share ideas when they strike me.  "Start!" 

Actually, entering 2015 I plan to start two separate idea-based series.  My work with the iCue Project focuses on usability issues for those who manage web sites. That is clearly a specialty niche, and that technical audience deserves a separate series focused just on those issues.

Here, this series will contain thoughts on life.  No narrow focus or small niche.  Just sharing new ideas as they strike me - or after I've mulled on them a bit.  And no rigid scheduling.  If I don't have anything to say, I'll wait until I do.

Did you notice that I said series and not blog?  I don't want to follow the typical blogger's pattern.  If I tell myself that this series of postings is different than a blog, then I'll be more likely to re-invent the format and content than follow a formula.  Better to be one-of-a-kind than another one of the quarter billion.  

In order to have a place to experiment with thoughts and share those that might have value, I need to start a new platform. 

Time to start.  Anew.