My Blog Turns 50

I've known about blogging for years, but I had the misfortune of first learning about it from an article written by someone who dismissively described it as a bunch of narcissistic, self-indulgent whining about boring stuff that no one else cared about.  Foolishly, I accepted this critique without further investigation.  Most subsequent opinions that I heard were along the same derogatory lines.  Even the positive opinions sounded awful.  They all praised blogging for being so "raw" and "free form" and "unedited" and "yeah!"  Brother, that sounded like a bigger mess than what my dog leaves in the back yard.  Meanwhile, all this information was being filtered into my brain through the word "blog" itself; quite possible the dumbest, ugliest word in the English language.  I don't care if it's short for "web log".  I don't care if it's short for "baloney log".  Can't we call it something else?  Can't we call it something cool, like "Vampire Hunting"?  I'd like to say I was a vampire hunter before I died, but what can I do?  I'm just one man!

Ahem...I'm getting a little ahead on my story here.  So there I was, lost and wandering the internet.  Occasionally, I would run across a curiously babbling fellow traveler who would call out from the wayside, "Hey there, Check out this link where this guy talks about what I was saying yesterday about the thing.  You know?"  I would thank this odd, simple creature and make haste in the direction that it sent me.  That was interesting, I would think, as I continued on my way.  Gradually, the world's dimmest light bulb went off over my head and it finally dawned on me that these were blogs that these people were sending me to.  I learned that while they could be self-indulgent, they certainly didn't have to be boring.  I learned that people used the format in a wide variety of ways.  I learned that you could write about something other than the color of your cat's latest hairball.

Why it took me so long to realize this, I don't know.  Honestly, I'm a little slow sometimes.  For some time, I'd had the idea floating around in the back of my mind of starting my own web site where I'd post regular articles about my ideas, and maybe reviews, and whatever.  I knew nothing about HTML coding, and I didn't want to pay for web hosting, though.  Then this blatantly obvious revelation about blogs came along, and I realized, hey, I could do all that by writing a blog.  And so, out of the formless void "nuclearheadache" was created, and I saw what I had made and I said, "Yeah, alright.  That'll work.  I think I'll go make myself a roast beef sandwich."

My office, or whatever you want to call it.

The first post I ever wrote and posted on this blog was actually the Artificial Intelligence post, which is now buried in the archive somewhere in the middle of October.  I was dissatisfied with it when I first wrote it.  It seemed like a bad way to start.  It was too cold and impersonal.  It set the wrong kind of tone, and I wasn't sure where to go from there.  So I pulled it, and started over with a little snippet that basically just said, "Hey world, I'm here."  Eventually that got deleted as well.  As it stands now, the earliest post on the blog is about this documentary that they showed on The History Channel called Apocalypse Island.  This seems like a fairly random place to start, but in a way it's appropriate.  I made this blog to delve into everything from the big questions of our existence to the little trivial details of our lives, from The Big Bang to fortune cookies.  That first post falls somewhere squarely in the middle.

As things rolled along, I got a feel for what I was doing and a better sense of how this was going to work.  I would weave certain running themes and topics in and out of each other, picking up the threads now and then, and interspersing them with stand alone posts.  So far this has worked out well, and it always leaves me feeling like I've got a lot more to deal with down the road, so I haven't run out of material yet.  At first I felt like I was speaking to an empty auditorium, listening to the uncanny echo of my own voice.  Eventually some people started to drift in.  Some of them probably mistook the place for a bar, or they just wanted to use the restroom, but some of you have stayed and made your own contributions.  I thank you for that, and for helping me feel like this isn't completely wasted effort.   

From some of the opinions I mentioned above, it's clear that professional writers consider blogging to be the internet's version of vanity publishing, something any old fool can do.  Even the "positive" remarks that I mentioned are unmistakably condescending.  It's true that anyone can start a blog.  You can have a new one up and running in five minutes if you like.  But not everyone can write a blog and stick to it, and not everyone can create a blog that anyone will actually read.  In this homemade, do-it-your-self world of electronic words, it may seem like there's no quality control whatsoever, but like any other form of publishing the quality is controlled by you, the reader.  A bad blog will whither and die on the vine.  Even self-publishing has its own form of natural selection.

So here we are at post number 50.  It's been fun so far, and hopefully I can see this through to another 50 and beyond.  When I hit 100, I think I'll take time out again for another filler post...errr, I mean retrospective.  Until then, hopefully I can keep it entertaining.