about me

 

creaking back to life So, uh, hi, it's been a while. I decided that I was going to quit blogging when Blogger discontinued FTP support, because I knew that migrating would change the URL, and otherwise annoy me. Plus I'd felt like a lot of my impulse to post things to the Internet had been adequately met by my (massively increased) activity on Facebook and Twitter (I'm jbushnell over there, FYI). But every once in a while I still get the impulse to write something that's longer than 120 characters (420 in the case of Facebook). And this week was one of those times. I wrote a long piece on information management, and then suddenly realized that I no longer had a good place on the Internet to put a piece of long-form text. I ended up using Facebook's "Notes" application—a kind of half-assed blog substitute—and the whole thing made me feel kind of sad. I probably would have just gotten over it and moved on except the information management project that I was writing about was also forcing me to go back through my old blog writings, in order to better integrate them with other digital notes. And going back and scanning through all those old posts was a really interesting experience. I realized that blogging made me think more critically about information that I was consuming. I realized that blogging helped me to focus more fruitfully on my own creative process. I realized that blogging made me—I really believe this—more intelligent. And having a pretty detailed record of the ups and downs of the last ten years is valuable. I like being able to look back and trace the development of ideas. I like seeing what I was reading then and comparing it to what I'm reading now. I like being able to go back and see the moment when I decided I needed a cell phone. In short, blogging makes me happy. I don't know if I'll be able to get back in the habit of it, whether it fits with what my life is now. But I think it's worth saying that I miss it. Labels: meta, personal

Tuesday, February 01, 2011 10:01 PM   Comments: WOOOOORD. I think there's a lot of old work left undone, and now's as good a time as any to get at it. # posted by  db : 11:20 PM   Post a Comment