Monday, October 10, 2016

An experiment

The word "blog" is derived from "weblog". The original blogs, back when the Internet was still steam-powered, consisted simply of a stream of notes and comments about whatever the author happened to be reading on the web. As a way of rebooting my sadly atrophied writing habit, I'd like to experiment here with reviving that form. Whether I end up producing anything out of it that's actually worth reading is secondary. One thing I anticipate is that many of the pages/posts/articles I read simply won't be worth commenting on, even for the sake of this experiment. (I originally expected to have at least a couple of links in this first post, for example, but really, I didn't find anything this morning that was worth the trouble.) And if they're not worth sharing, how much of my time are they worth to read in the first place? I'm pretty sure I'll end up motivated to spend less time browsing. At the same time, though, there really is good stuff out there, and I'm nowhere near ready to give up my Internet jones cold-turkey. As so often, the challenge is to separate the wheat from the chaff, the signal from the noise. Given that I'm already starting from RSS feeds and Twitter streams that I've at some point opted to follow, I'm not really sure yet how to approach that.

So if I indeed don't produce anything that's itself worth reading here, am I contributing to the problem? Since I'm pretty sure I've never written with enough consistency (never mind talent or insight) to build anything like a "readership", that's not something I'm going to worry about for now.

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