Confessions of a Reluctant Blogger

I swore I’d never do it.

Since I filled a hand-made journal given to me by my oh-so-artsy high school girlfriend with the painfully earnest poetry of a grunge-era teenager so many years ago, I’ve resisted the diarist’s urge. After my brief flirtation with chronicling a life that had barely begun, a diary seemed self-indulgent beyond the point that even my less-than-abstemious twenty-something self could tolerate. When people started posting the prosaic day-to-day minutiae of their lives on the (then-new) World-Wide Web, I was even more skeptical; it was clear to me that everyone’s lives were in fact a lot less interesting than they themselves thought they were. The launch of technologies — like Blogger, for example — that were devoted to democratizing the weblog form beyond those who knew how to make webpages seemed like just another brick removed from the crumbling wall between the private and the public — reality tv for the web medium.

And so I sat out the beginnings of the blogging revolution, satisfied that I was missing nothing. Why, then, after so many years of resistance, have I taken up the virtual pen now?

• Legitimate business reasons. Blogs have become an important part of the “starfish” promotional strategy of many businesses, politicians, bands, and so on, since they a) generate a lot of frequently updated content for search engines to latch onto; and b) give readers a reason to return to your site. If I’m going to use this site to promote my professional life, it makes sense to leverage this technology.
• Organizing one’s thoughts is, uh, what’s that word? Oh yeah, good. In these days of information overload, keeping track of the contents of one’s mental life can be difficult. I find that with so many things competing for my attention, it’s easy for some of them to slip through the cracks. Writing down my impressions of, for example, new developments in design will help me remember and sort them out, regardless of whether or not anyone else reads them. Like Montaigne’s essais, blog posts provide the opportunity to examine, question, and evaluate the sea of signal and noise that often threatens to drown us. And unlike a traditional journal, a blog makes one’s thoughts searchable.
• They’re here to stay. Like it or not, blogs have emerged as arguably the most widespread application of the information revolution. If I’m going to position myself in the marketplace as a web professional, I need to have as much experience with them as possible.

So in this space, you’ll find musings and notes on some of the things that make me tick both professionally (design, web technology and culture) and personally (mostly music, with the occasional diversion into my previous life as an academic studying the history of religions and Bollywood film). If, from time to time, you do me the honor of reading my ramblings, I hope they prove interesting and that you’ll occasionally take the opportunity to leave some comments.