Friday, August 19, 2005

In 3-D!

Mena Trott and the Movable Type posse put together a nifty custom ViewMaster and reel set for a recent conference. (I honestly had no idea they still made ViewMasters. With the return of real wooden Lincoln Logs, my long-past childhood lives again!)

Behold: If Bloggers Had Been Around Throughout History.

(And yes, you can order your own—spendy!—custom ViewMaster reels and viewers.)

Saturday, August 6, 2005

I also considered “The Fabulous Barrett Boys”…

Cameron and Damien Barrett—the Blogger Twins—are making a bid to be contestants on the next season of The Amazing Race.

Wednesday, August 3, 2005

That word again!

Rebecca asked about the citation I mentioned in this entry, and whether Peter was, in fact, credited with the coinage. I went to look again and realized that, in fact, my reference to Peter's comment appears to pre-date the comment itself. That may be because his quip was in an undated sidebar on his site. Anyway, here we are, sic transit gloria mundi, caveat lector, etcetera etcetera...



Note also that this appears to be a draft entry which, I take it, means it hasn't moved into the printed edition of the Oxford English Dictionary just yet.

The OED entry for "weblog", incidentally, cites Jorn Barger—rightly, I think—as being the first to use it in this sense in 1997 on his Robot Wisdom weblog. (Back then, of course, we knew it as http://www.mcs.net/~jorn/html/weblog.html.)

It is defined as "A frequently updated web site consisting of personal observations, excerpts from other sources, etc., typically run by a single person, and usually with hyperlinks to other sites; an online journal or diary."

That's the second definition, of course. The first definition for "weblog" is "A file storing a detailed record of requests handled (and sometimes also errors generated) by a web server." I remember back in the late 20th century when there was some concern people would hear the word "weblog" and not understand which sense was meant.

Thank heavens Peter Merholz came along and gave us a convenient shorthand, eh?

Monday, August 1, 2005

Present at the birth

A couple of months ago, I got an e-mail from Bill Johnston, a professor of history at Wesleyan University, that left me momentarily gob-smacked:

You might have received millions of messages to this effect, but did you know you are cited as the first to use the word "blog" in the OED (1999)? Very cool. Not many people have an honor like that; I'm delighted to see that your site is still going strong.

As it happens, his was the first and, so far, only message about the matter I've received, but I went and looked in the online OED—one of the perks of the occasional academic life is free access thereto—and, sure enough, this little ol' website is the first citation for the word. (I haven't had an opportunity to examine a printed version of the dictionary, so I don't know if it's included there as well.)

Now before anyone gets their knickers in a twist, let's be clear: I am not claiming to have coined the word "blog". I've been dragged along that sort of road before and don't care to repeat the experience. As far as I know, my pal Peter Merholz has to take the blame for it, having waggishly proclaimed six years ago that he was henceforth pronouncing "weblog" as "wee-blog". I made a note of his jape hereabouts and it is to that weblog entry—currently languishing in The Lost Archives but hopefully soon to be republished—that the OED citation refers.

(And I must apologize to Mr. Johnston because, although I transcribed his e-mail here for just this moment, I seem to have misplaced the original and, therefore, his address. I have the distinct impression that I never got around to replying and thanking him for his kind note. Bill, if you're reading this, do be in touch.)

Anyway, I bring this dreary subject up for two reasons.

First, I have been enjoying the Lady Rebecca Blood's interviews with some of the early practitioners of the weblog form, including Matt Haughey (in which piece this site is again name-checked) and Jessamyn West. They are two of the folks I have been privileged to have as part of my life this past few years, thanks primarily to our shared interest in personal publishing, and each has an unique perspective on where the web has been and where it may be going.

Second, despite my rather contrary insistence on referring to this site and others like it as a "weblog" (sans truncation), it has recently come to pass that I will soon be writing and editing a site that is not only called a "blog", it has that word in its name.

Somewhere at this very moment, I feel certain Peter Merholz is either smirking or cringing.

Possibly both.

Monday, June 27, 2005

Hyperbole much?

Such a fuss! I know that The BradLands is blocked by some content filters (such as at some workplaces) and I've never really minded. First of all, hey, it's a silly little personal website. Secondly, it's not the government squelching my right to post links about hot boys and Safari extensions. No big. If folks are trying to read my site at work and can't...well, they can wait until they get home like the rest of the grownup world.

On the other end of the reaction spectrum, our pal Cory Doctorow noticed that a website to which he contributes, SurfControl for its "adult content". His reaction to this outrage was measured, deliberate and not at all out of proportion.

I just got off the phone with a manager at SurfControl, who assures me that they've corrected the error, but that it will take 24h for the fix to take hold. During that period, users of Surfcontrol's paying customers will be walled off from Boing Boing the same way that Chinese and Iranian citizens are prevented from seeing parts of the Internet due to the judgements of unaccountable authorities in those countries.

Why yes, it's exactly the same way, isn't it? Except, you know, in the important ways that it isn't. Surfcontrol's paying customers are "walled off" from the site because...well, they paid to be. If they didn't but their boss did, they're still not horribly oppressed like the citizens of an unaccountable regime. Their boss is accountable, probably, to a board or a higher boss who'd rather they didn't pleasure surf on company time.

And while I enjoy reading Boing Boing and am far (far, far) from the most prudish person you're likely to meet, I can see how some of their edgier posts might be considered inappropriate in certain environments. "Adult website" might be pushing it but, c'mon, so is comparing what's going on here to arbitrary and evil government censorship.

Thursday, June 23, 2005

Two (well, three) things about Cameron Marlow…

1. If you maintain a weblog, whether you're new to personal publishing or have been at it a while, go now and participate in this brief survey—entirely on the up-and-up, you won't be spammed, it's for a good cause (Cam's graduation), etc. etc. Do it before Monday! I, for one, can't wait to see the results.

2. During SXSW, someone snapped a picture of me making out with smooching Cameron at Paradise. If it was you, please please please send me or point me toward the picture. Thanks!

3. He's just cute as the Dickens, ain't he?

Sunday, June 19, 2005

A little help?

My friend Savannah lives in the remote and lovely Alaska community of Seldovia and publishes the town's online newspaper, the Seldovia Herald. Unfortunately, some ne'er-do-wells are squatting on all the proper domain names for the paper in a rather infantile attempt to squelch her efforts at truly independent media. After publishing the paper on a tilde account for a long while, she's finally tired of trying to explain a long, arcane web address to her eager readers, so she registered the domain sovnews.com and is now publishing there.

Won't you help give the legitimate Seldovia Herald a little Google juice? If you publish a website or weblog, just link to the address www.sovnews.com with the linktext "Seldovia Herald" (like so: Seldovia Herald). It'd be ever-so-much appreciated.

Plus you get a bonus into the bargain: Have a look at the Seldovia Herald, published every Thursday, and enjoy a glimpse of small-town Alaska life. They're just wrapping up a very cool music festival there this weekend, which I expect will be a big story in this week's edition, among other news.

Thanks!

Wednesday, June 1, 2005

Oh.

Why cyclists wear black pants.

Wednesday, April 6, 2005

If vaudeville ain’t dead, this’ll kill it

By request, a brief reprise of my impromptu Al Jolson number from SXSW:

MT, MT...
I'd rebuild a million files for new template styles...
My emmmmmm-teeeeee!

Wednesday, March 23, 2005

I have extremely silly friends…

All your base are belong to Flickr memes:

• That black man is stealing that chair!
• Molly on the phone
• Flickr is having a massage

Congratulations, by the way, to Stewie, Caterina and all the Flickr folk on their recent nuptials.

Thursday, February 24, 2005

Micro-Medici

During the past couple of days, there's been a lot of discussion in some quarters about my pal Jason Kottke's announcement on Tuesday that he had quit his job and intended to devote his attention and energy full-time to his website. In return, he hopes, the website will support him.

Well, not the website, per se, since he's more or less said there'll be no advertising or commercial ventures in his plan. So not the website but the web community that surrounds it—fellow creators of web content, readers and viewers of his pages, kindred souls who believe he contributes something valuable to the web and the world through his work. Jason is taking a major cut in pay and mounting a three-week fund drive to support himself and his art, and he's asked those who believe in what he's doing—and has done on the web for almost a decade—to help with a modest contribution. Dozens already have. I am one of them.

There's been some criticism—derision, mostly—of Jason's plan and, in particular, the fact that he is essentially asking for donations to fund a year away from traditional work obligations to concentrate on his website. Some folks are incredulous. It's unseemly, they say, to beg for dollars. Others are underwhelmed by the prospect of what he's proposing. Why should we pay, they ask, so some guy can sit in a Brooklyn apartment and surf the web all day? When so many do it for free, why cough up bucks so Jason can write a weblog? Still others are mildly interested in his "experiment", but wary. Maybe one fella can make a living doing this, in this way. Maybe a handful can. But it's not sustainable. Everyone can't just quit their job and write on the web. Can they?

I think a lot of the skepticism about what Jason is doing comes from a basic misunderstanding of his goal. He's not just a guy with a weblog or, at least, I don't think that's what he wants to be. Jason is a dreamer, an artist, a fundamentally inquisitive, intensely creative person and I don't think he wants to just write a weblog. I think he wants to make the web. Back when I first started really paying attention to what was going on with the web, one of the first sites I tripped across was Jason Kottke's 0sil8, an occasionally changing, ever-fascinating look at what the web could be: storyteller, artistic expression, community builder, exercise in vanity. By today's standards, it wasn't fancy, but it was intriguing and it was a little voyeuristic. Reading 0sil8 was like watching someone—watching Jason—explore. Learn. Push at the boundaries. Try new things. Sometimes hit a home run and engage your mind for hours poking around his creations. Sometimes strike out with three men on and still have you looking forward to his next at bat.

Jason says he wants to work full-time on kottke.org, and while I haven't talked with him about it, I sincerely doubt he plans to limit himself to a weblog. Or another 0sil8. I think he plans to explore and learn and push at the boundaries a little. He's embarking on a personal journey, an adventure, an experiment, and I can't wait to see what he does. And I'm happy to lend some support while he does it.

The keyword in "spare change" is change

Last year, I started a little experiment of my own.

I use Quicken to manage my finances and I get my salary sent straight to the bank with Direct Deposit. I pay my bills electronically. I use a debit card or a Visa or American Express to make most of my purchases. Most of this money moving happens behind the scenes and even though I don't have a lot of it to begin with, I began to realize I was losing touch with my money. I bought food for the table and paid the house note and yes, there were books and DVDs and vacations that were all duly enjoyed, and I even gave a big chunk of it—more than I realized actually, but discovered while doing my taxes last week—to charities and causes in which I believe.

But something someone said to me offhandedly over a year ago stuck in my mind. "There are no modern-day Medicis," she said. "Corporations and foundations send grants to museums and theatres. Occasionally, a wealthy matron or civic-minded financier will pony up to buy a bust or underwrite a fund-raiser. And the National Endowment for the Arts offers what little it can to artists and musicians. But where will the next Renaissance come from? Who is helping the dreamers make their dreams real?"

I won't pretend that I'm trying to make anyone's dreams come true, except maybe my own. But I booted up Quicken last year and told it to divert a little bit—not a lot, but not an insignificant amount either—from every paycheck I deposited into a separate account. I called it "Medici", told Quicken to fill it and tried to put it out of my mind.

But then, throughout the year, when I saw a chance to help someone on their way to a dream or a passion or a way to bring beauty or interest into the world, I took a little out of my Medici fund and I gave it away. It's entirely self-serving on my part, not because I expect their gratitude, but because I expect that at some point, it's going to pay a dividend to me that can't be calculated in interest points. It will bring a little bit of music into the world. It will brighten my life through their creation or, at the very least, through my being able to share their joy in the act of creating.

I didn't keep a strict accounting and, at the end of the year, there was some money left over in the Medici account so I wrote two checks to zero it out: one to a small local theatre company and one to buy a small pot from an artist friend that I gave as a holiday gift. Throughout the year, a photographer of my acquaintance mentioned he was saving buy a new lens and so I gave him $50. A woman I went to school with told me over lunch that she had hoped to take a painting class in the summer but one of her kids needed braces, so all the money in the household was going that direction. I bought her a gift certificate at the arts center where I used to work. I gave a little bit to a friend who's making a documentary film about her favorite band. I put ten bucks in the guitar case of a street musician I could have listened to for an hour or more if I hadn't had to go back to jury duty.

Those and another dozen or so small donations were all deducted from my Medici fund and given with no strings attached. Maybe they bought paint and canvas, maybe they bought a book, maybe they just paid for a sandwich and drinks before rushing off to dance class. Whatever. I consider it all money well spent.

And this week I made this year's first deduction from my Medici fund to help Jason do his thing. Look ma, I'm a patron of the arts!

I'm not writing this here to brag and I realize that phrases like "funding a dream" and "bringing beauty into the world" sound a little grand and romantic. But think about it, and consider maybe you can have a Medici account too. You don't need a lot of money, you don't need a specific agenda and you sure as hell don't need Quicken to make it work. And five dollars here or 30 dollars there isn't going to make anyone rich.

But my photographer friend and a budding documentarian and a busker in front of the Civil Courts—and Jason Kottke—aren't looking to get rich, I don't think. They want to dream, to learn, to explore, to push back the boundaries.

And if I get to be a little part of that, I'm as rich as I'll ever need to be.

Wednesday, November 10, 2004

Aaron Bailey in Chicago

He almost got away with it, but some of us keep an eye on seemingly fallow bookmarks and noticed that after posting a few not-quite-cryptic links alluding to relocation, the lovely and talented Aaron Bailey up and moved to Chicago, joining the ever-swelling ranks of smart, sexy webloggers in the City That Makes No Small Plans.

Election schmelection. Things are looking up.

Out on a Limb…er, Date

You can fool all of the people some of the time: Looking over the past few months referrer logs for this site, I discovered that the proprietor of Out on a Date — the enigmatically named 'S', which I'm choosing to believe stands for "sassy" — seems to be under the impression that I'd be a great date.

Now don't that just beat all? Chalk up another victory to savvy marketing.

S's slightly suspect taste aside, Out on a Date has so far been a ripping, if infrequently updated (and who am I to talk?), read. The premise certainly holds promise:

"Out On A Date" is where I'll blog about my dating experiences as a 30-something 'mo in L.A. I want to put this all out there because I wonder: are my experiences (the good, the bad, and the completely fucking ridiculously awful) unique? I believe that gay and straight, boy and girl, we all share more similarities that differences and that goes for dating, too. Do straight guys blow off straight girls the same way gay guys do to each other? Do gay girls really settle down so easily ("why are you bringing a U-Haul on the second date?")? Does every online personal ad sound the same? This is the kind of stuff I'm curious about, and why I'd like to hear from y'all.

So this blog is for anyone curious about online dating, about speed dating, about chat rooms, about how to really get out there and "find that special someone" (as all the dating sites endlessly promise!).

It's for anyone tired of trying to meet guys at bars, clubs and circuit parties.

Head over there and read up and maybe give S your own two cents on the dating scene. Maybe he'll even collect enough pennies to buy a vowel for his name.

Monday, December 29, 2003

SXSWblog is sleeping

WAKE UP!!! Only 74 shopping days until SXSW Interactive 2004! Let's hear some chatter, eh?

(And yes, for those who have asked, there will be a Fourth-and-a-half Annual Edition of Break Bread with Brad, held on the evening of Friday, March 12, venue and time to be announced in mid-January. Drinks, dinner, door prizes and the distinct possibility Jish will even show up on time this year, rather than steal my thunder with a "fashionably late" star entrance. Further bulletins as events warrant.)

Wednesday, November 19, 2003

Link and Think (re)Launch

Link, think, react and act: Link and Think is an observance of World AIDS Day -- Monday, December 1, 2003 -- in the personal web publishing communities. The project involves hundreds of webloggers, journalers, diarists and other personal website publishers, each linking to resources about HIV/AIDS or publishing personal stories about how the AIDS pandemic has affected them.

Learn more about Link and Think and, if you publish a personal website, consider participating this year.

Link to cool sites. Think about how AIDS affects you. React to the threat of AIDS around the world. Act by getting involved with a local AIDS service organization. Focus on AIDS for one day -- World AIDS Day -- and help spread information about the disease, its treatment, those we have lost and those who survive. Because AIDS is not over and because you can make a difference.

On December 1, The BradLands will participate in this project for the fifth year. Here's last year's entry.

Thursday, September 25, 2003

Webloggers Against Drunken Posting

Webloggers Against Drunken Posting: Mike wants a weblog Breathalyzer, something to keep him from updating his website under the influence.

If we could guarantee that Fox News would deploy it, I'd invest in R&D. Really, how hard would it be to hook up a BAC-tester with a USB dongle and write a little software daemon to shut down the PC if you're pissed?

Monday, September 15, 2003

Shut up and pucker.

Stick with what works: It probably would not surprise anyone who knows me to learn how many of my conversations end with "Shut up and pucker." (Or some variation thereof.)

Also, "anil sex" remains one of the top 5 search referrers leading visitors to The BradLands. We're so proud.

Saturday, August 23, 2003

Happy 4th, Blogger!

Four years old and feeling lucky: Evan Williams notes that four years ago today, Blogger was sprung on the world, a world unsuspecting that a personal publishing revolution was at hand. Happy fourth birthday, Blogger, and congrats to everyone who made it possible!

What a difference a few years make, eh? Why, it wasn't that long ago that everyone was watching to spot a one- or two-minute interval between weblog posts on Blogger's "Recently Updated" list. Look at any weblog monitoring service today and you'll likely see several hundred posts being made every minute. It's a revolution, indeed.

(Even though it's been a while since I used Blogger to update this site, the Blog of the Week list, to which The Daily Brad was added years ago, remains one of the top daily referrers to this site. Go figure.)

Sunday, July 27, 2003

Blogathon Success!

Weglogging in the wee hours, part II: I extend wishes of congratulations and pleasant dreams to all of the participants in the third annual Blogathon which, as of this writing, raised over $90,000 for some very deserving charities as personal publishers around the world stayed up and updated their websites for 24 hours. Like any marathon, it was by turns exhausting and exhilarating.

I'm pleased to have sponsored Rannie Turingan's Photojunkie site and his charity AIDS Committee of Toronto. And I'll soon be making a substantial contribution to Modest Needs as well, in recognition of Cat Connor's hard work and dedication in organizing the 'thon.

Pledges after the fact will be accepted for another day or two. I encourage you to stop by the Blogathon website, to check out some of the participants, and to consider sponsoring one or more sites.

Update: Pledge totals have now exceeded $100,000. [7/27/03]

Wednesday, July 2, 2003

Weblog in the wee hours

Weblog in the wee hours: The 2003 Blogathon -- scheduled for July 26 -- is now accepting participants and pledges. Personal publishers around the world, staying up all night and posting with a purpose. Last year's event raised more than $50,000 for some great charities. Please to be checking it out.

Tuesday, July 23, 2002

Hip-deep in pie

A THOUSAND WORDS: Y'know, kiddo, if you'd like to put that webcam to some productive use, I'd be more than happy to help you look for your twin.

HIP-DEEP IN PIE: I've returned home to a pile of e-mail and other reading, by far the best of which was this news that every episode of SportsNight is to be released in a DVD package. Anything that increases the amount of Peter Krause in my diet is a very, very good thing. [heads up from Dan]

Monday, June 25, 2001

June 25, 2001

Var'aq is an open-source Klingon programming language. Today is a good day to code.

It's really something of a Klingon Basic, a simple, loosely-typed programming language designed mostly just to be used for programming things like command displays and high-level control systems. In its eventual final incarnation, we're looking at concurrency, advanced mathematics, and even native support for distributed programs (try finding that in the C++ standard library).

Unhip: The Socks-Shorts Combo: Ugly at Any Speed. Hey, I just spent a weekend in the park with several thousand homosexuals. You won't get any argument here from me.

The Official Rube Goldberg Website.

(WEB)LOG-ROLLING: I've really been groovin' on Wood s lot — a lot — these past couple of months. Go there. It'll grow on ya.

I'M SO GLAD WE HAD THIS TIME TOGETHER: A brief history of The Carol Burnett Show(s) — now available on video from Columbia House — at TV Party.

JUST MY "TYPE": OK, so maybe the Big Trouble trailer wasn't the only good thing about seeing Swordfish. After all, Hugh Jackman spent at least 10 minutes in the movie with his shirt off, so I suppose that's gotta count for something. Not nearly so naughty is Hugh Jackman in ASCII. (More at ASCII Babes.)

Wednesday, June 16, 1999

Why I Weblog

A rumination on where the hell I’m going with this website

About a year ago, I took the plunge and set up my own domain name. It was a practical decision, the result of having been buffeted from ISP to ISP by poor customer service, busy signals and escalating service fees. I felt the need to have a static e-mail address that I could feel safe printing on stationery and carry with me in my nomadic quest for the perfect provider.

After electing to register "bradlands.com," the urge to publish on the net returned in spades. I’ve had a personal site called "The BradLands" off and on for six or seven years, since I first dipped my toe in the waters of HTML using America Online‘s clunky FTP space to serve a few vanity pages.

The BradLands have (has?) been, by turns:

• a fairly typical and boring home page, outlining my interest, with obligatory links to some "cool sites" and with pictures of my friends;
• a somewhat more ambitious attempt to collect all of my writings, online and off, in one linked space;
• a poorly realized city guide to my fair city, St. Louis, back when there were few others;
• and, finally, the personal home page again, showing severe signs of infrequent updating and terminal link rot.

But here I was with a brand-new domain name and a need to show it off. I’ve always been prone to publishing in one form or another. An early indicator of my predisposition for journalism can be found among my parents’ scrapbooks: it’s a two page "family newsletter" I wrote longhand on legal paper when I was four or five years old, photocopied on my mom’s mammoth IBM copier and distributed to interested readers.

Total circulation: two. Mom. Dad. Well, color me a magnate.

A few months before I threw up my hands and uttered a few colorful curses when my then-provider’s local POP pooped out for the umpteenth time, I had started reading Steve Bogart’s personal website, News, Pointers and Commentary (now NowThis).

Steve used to perform in an a capella group called MACH 1. I saw them perform one night at Washington University, then checked out their site when I got home. His personal site was linked from there, and I discovered we had some common interests. His main page was updated frequently, in a fashion called "news page" or "web log," so I checked back from time to time and enjoyed his pointers to other web reading and his personal "scribbles" about computing issues and other topics. (A side note: For those of you keeping score at home, I’ve been reading Steve’s page for more than a year. He works right down the street from me. We’ve never met, and have only just started a little e-mail correspondence. It’s a small world sometimes. And sometimes, it’s a wide one too. <grin>)

From Steve’s page, I followed a link to Jorn Barger’s Robot Wisdom Weblog, and Jorn’s page led me to Raphael Carter’s Honeyguide and...well, from there the trail gets a little murky. Suffice it to say, I started reading these weblogs regularly and, eventually, decided to start one of my own.

The BradLands, version 3.0 (or so) was born, June 1998.

The early style of my weblog was wholly aped (OK, stolen) from Steve’s page: a quote du jour, a few links, now and then a rant. As I continued to write for myself and audience of two or three readers a day, I also explored other sites that were maintaining similar pages.

Even though I was not, like Steve and Jorn, using Frontier to maintain my site, I became a regular reader of Dave Winer’s Scripting News. I discovered Cameron Barrett’s CamWorld, Peter Merholz’s PeterMe, Lawrence Lee’s Tomalak’s Realm and Bill Humphries’ More Like This.

And, in the recent revamp of The BradLands, I borrowed (OK, stole) extensively from each of them to create the format I use today.

The BradLands still has a weblog; it’s the page you’re greeted with when you visit bradlands.com. I’ve added sections for my old published writing (incomplete, but growing), my new web-based essays, my current and all-time favorite books, and a few other bits I’ve yet to develop. Laurel Krahn, proprietor of the "Homicide: Life on the Street"-centric Minneapolis-based Windowseat called what I do a "web home" when she noted its appearance in her own weblog. I suppose that’s as apt a description of The BradLands as any.

But at the heart of it--posted right on the front door--is my weblog, infrequent though it may be, updating readers (now numbering about 60 per day) about projects I’m working on, links I find interesting, topics for discussion.

As The BradLands grew over the last year, more and more folks have started weblogs of their own, some with specific topics around which they focus, others more general in nature. There’s a whole category for the breed in NewHoo and other web directories are taking note the "weblog phenomenon."

At the same time, there’s been some navel-gazing among those of us who maintain these sorts of pages, pondering why we do what we do the way we do it. Some folks have tried to define just what comprises a weblog; the definitions range narrow to wide. Cam had one of the better, I thought.

Rather than add my voice to the fray and debate what is and is not a proper weblog, or to contemplate what purpose such a thing might serve for the web community at large, I’ve been thinking about why I do it. Whether I’ll continue. What shape The BradLands will take if I do.

Call it "The BradLand Manifesto," or, if you like, "Why I Weblog":

The aforementioned need to publish: I get off on seeing my words in print. My first byline in a daily newspaper almost made me wet myself with glee. More than that, I like the notion of leaving my words behind--even given the relatively ephemeral nature of the web--for others to find and enjoy.

A desire to minimize "fram": About the 15th time I received forwarded e-mail about "Why the Internet is like a penis" or a plea for a terminally-ill child who wants to receive greeting cards to make a world’s record, I vowed never ever to forward a joke, petition or other long-winded e-mail to my entire address book. I get about 20 pieces of mail like this everyday, often the same thing from several different folks around the country. (A wry observer called this propagation of forwarded mail "fram," a coinage denoting "spam from friends.") Instead of blindly cc’ing everyone I know, if I think it’s worthy of passing on, I try to track down the original source on the web (’cause it’s there somewhere!) and either post the URL in my weblog or e-mail just one or two folks I know who’ll truly to be interested. As a result, I don’t clutter my friend’s in-boxes and folks who know me well also know they can check out my website to see if anything truly noteworthy as come my way.

An opportunity to learn: This isn’t strictly a motivation for my weblog, but it’s a happy consequence. I got my first taste of HTML and web publishing during my brief stint as a tech writer. My first few pages were hand-coded in vi, and gave me a chance to learn the lingo from the ground up. Although these days, I tend to rely on WYSIWYG tools for most of the heavy-lifting, I’m still continuing to learn about markup by tweaking things by hand. I’m also getting some good insight into things such as how search engines work (or don’t), how to grok JavaScript and--a leisurely summer provided--how to automate some stuff with scripting. I’m picking up cool skills in a pleasurable way that may have some real-world application down the line. A spoonful of sugar, and all that.

A license to explore: I spend a lot of time on the Internet, probably 2-3 hours a day all told reading for pleasure, maybe another hour or so on strictly work-related matters. I’ve more or less transferred my real-world habit of reading three newspapers a day to the web, only now I skim more like 25-30 publications regularly. I’m reading more and enjoying it. Still, using my weblog to link to stuff I’ve discovered in my surfing ameliorates some of my guilt about spending so much time in front of the screen. Surfing the Internet is fun, learning new things and discovering new resources is cool, and sharing the wealth with my weblog readers is a joy.

A sense of community: The first time I had a sense of the Internet as a place to convene a community was as a lurker and occasional poster on Usenet. As malicious and merely injudicious cross-posting unacceptably raised the newsgroup signal-to-noise ratio, I rediscovered that same feeling on a few, well-chosen e-mail lists, to which I contributed more often. I’ve skimmed back the number of lists I subscribe to, but I still have a sense of community on the Internet, and it’s largely a community I’ve created and nurtured myself. People who read The BradLands write to me to share links they think I might enjoy. Sometimes, things I mention in my weblog show up in other folks’ weblogs too, with credit to me for pointing the way. Cameron Barrett has created the best of both worlds with his CamList, a mailing list for readers of his weblog. My weblog is linked from several others, and theirs from mine. We are a community, of sorts, a small town sharing gossip and news, recreation and sport, laughter and tears, all for the commonweal. And, for the most part, we’re friendly to strangers.

It’s that last part that’s distressing to some folks who’ve taken a step back and looked at the relatively young practice of weblogging. The tendency of identical or similar links to show up in several different logs, and the frequency of reciprocal links among webloggers is seen as perhaps unhealthy, a form of incest that---we’re told---can lead to a flattened sameness among our pages.

I haven’t seen anything approaching a day when all of the dozen or so weblogs I read daily have completely identical links. On the occasions when two or more of us point to the same stories, well, it’s because those are the big stories on the ‘net (or at least among geeks) that day. It’s no different than those occasions when channels 2, 4, 5, 8 and 11 all lead with the same feature on the evening news.

In fact, in the offline world, that sort of thing is much more common. Our weblogs, by contrast, are incredible in their manifold diversity.

Those who would dismiss weblogging as a pointless self-referrential exercise or, in vulgar parlance, a big ol’ Internet-based circle jerk, aren’t looking toward the future.

I am. Over the next few months, I’ll be narrowing the focus of The BradLands somewhat, limiting the topics that are regularly noted in the weblog to those that most interest me. (How limiting this is remains to be seen; I have quite catholic interests.) But, with time, The BradLands will evolve with an unique voice, a definite attitude, a clearer motivation.

Meanwhile, other folks will be starting weblogs of their own, defined by their own interests, published with their own voices. As more and more do so, the weblog movement will begin to realize its true power, a more widely distributed version of what the Open Directory and other collaborative web directories have promised but only minimally delivered.

Hundreds of individuals, sorting through the Internet, pointing to the links that they find interesting and that they believe would interest their friends and colleagues and a few bystanders besides.

Sure, two or four or more of us will point to the same "big story" from time to time, or even to the same "small story." That’s OK. I have a different set of readers than Laurel does, and she attracts a different crowd than Cam, and Jorn has yet another audience. There’s some overlap, but there’s a whole lot of difference too, because we’re different people.

An old maxim states that editors separate the wheat from the chaff and then publish the chaff.

As the weblog movement matures, our sites will wrest editorial authority the few editors of today and divide it among the many. "They" can continue to publish the chaff; we’ll be there to point our hungry readers toward the wheat. Hopefully, we’ll have fun doing it and learn a lot along the way.

And that, my friends, is why I weblog.