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05/18/2006: "So, What Is A Blog, Anyway?"

I spend an inordinate amount of time engaged in two activities - working with computers, and convincing myself I'm younger than I really am. It's not very often that those two collide, I gotta tell ya. This is one of those rare cases, though.

This is a blog, which is trendy geek shorthand for "weblog". Once upon a time, all news and information came from big monolithic sources like Walter Cronkite or the Los Angeles Times. We believed them because, well, they were big monoliths. Also, we had no real choice but to believe, since there were no alternatives.

Of course, as we've all learned the hard way, monoliths lie - usually in proportion to their monolithicness. Man was desperate for an alternative. Fortunately for all of us, Al Gore invented the Internet, which begat the blog.

The earliest blogs were just little scratchpad entries put together by someone who had something they just had to say. It didn't really matter if anyone read them - just so long as they got written. Two things changed all that. The first was RSS - Really Simple Syndication. In a nutshell, it's a code protocol that allows content to be shared among a number of websites, effectively expanding the audience of all. The other was the ready access to point-and-click blogging sites such as Blogger and Blogspot. Now you didn't need to be a geek to maintain a blog - you just had to have something to say.

I, of course, am a geek, so I set up my own blogging program. Whether or not I have something to say remains to be seen.

Next entry - or at least the next meaningful one - will talk about your role in this grand experiment ...