I was thinking yesterday about the first time I noticed the web. It was 1995 and Yahoo! was still "Jerry and David's Guide to the World Wide Web." At the time I was a writer, and the Internet struck me as the perfect way to talk to readers without all the fuss of contracts and editors, not to mention dead trees. It was clearly a better way to communicate.
It's almost 2010, and in the spirit of New Year's resolutions, I've decided to try this blogging thing again. Yes, it's been a long time. I've been absent from the blogosphere for almost two years. With Twitter, Facebook and the hundreds of other social networking sites out there, blogs lost some of their lustre for me. Why spend time writing a post when you can just Twitter the info in 160 characters or less to your friends? But I've missed the longer format of the blog post. Here, I can write more leisurely and at greater length about what I'm thinking or doing. Maybe I'm just long-winded, but tweets and FB updates don't give me enough room to expand on an idea and really express myself—like reading the teaser on the back cover and never the book.
I was glad to hear that Douglas Bowman intends to start blogging more again. His StopDesign has long been one of my favorite blogs. For good reason it seems, because right off the bat he wrote something that struck a cord in me.
We have a nice New Years' tradition. With two other families who we've known since before we became families, we journey to Tucson and (without malice) take over a resort or hotel. The kids run wild; the adults eat and drink and talk and pretend not to notice the boys are lobbing water balloons over the balcony railing again. We get to know a lot of security folks on a first name basis this way.
This year I spent a good part of the time holed up in our room, ironing out the wrinkles from this blog...
A blog without comments is a lonely thing. Somehow in switching from Movable Type to Drupal, probably while mucking around in MySQL with inexperienced hands, I lost all the comments on this blog.
The sadness I feel makes me realize how important the people who comment here have become to me. Our conversations—our relationships—have been lost, and what's left are only my own words, alone. A conversation of one.
