Like so many people, I let my blog, which I had started at the end of 2000, fall into a state of utter neglect as various social networks took over in the late 2000s. But in the past couple of years I went through a conscious effort to improve my information diet, and that took me back to where I started: a careful selection of handpicked RSS feeds consumed via an RSS reader, many of which are blogs from entrepreneurs and interesting companies.
Despite applying the same upstream filtering to my various social media streams (i.e. I don’t follow celebrities and other noisy crap on Twitbook+), I find their information density way too low. If anything, the current crop of self-centered, ephemeral social media show the lasting value of a good blog with a purpose.
This infodiet clean-up forced me to confront the fact that I had stopped my own blog out of sheer laziness. Part of it was technical, as my Movable Type install had gradually fallen apart and I was not eager to commit hours to try and fix a system that was obviously a dead end. And part of it was an underlying lack of writing motivation, what with my day job already implying a lot of reading, writing, editing, and thinking about these tasks. Part of it was the nagging feeling that if it’s worth writing a blog post, it’s worth doing it right, otherwise you might as well stick to 140-character one-liners.
It happens that I had to become fairly proficient with WordPress in the past year for professional reasons, so the perspective of fixing and continuing to operate my own CMS had become less of a hurdle. (I don’t like much hosted CMSes as they feel like straight-jackets.) And there is a number of issues I’d like to write about once in a while, from international macroeconomics informed by micro “facts on the ground” (i.e. no laughable pseudoscience math-based BS), to the evolving software-as-a-service ecosystem, to modern online newsmaking. So the motivation built up to reboot my domain name.
I don’t plan to write very frequently, but I do plan to revive a modicum of a personal presence in a space that I own. Stay tuned. Stay tuned? Who am I kidding, nobody is going to read this entry, and rebuilding even a minimal audience will take time, if it happens at all.