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.