Gadzooks, I’ve decided to do a blog.

Since I’ve been complaining about blogs for so long I have
rationalized my decision. Here’s what I hope to get out of it and
here’s why you might consider doing something similar. I will
gladly link to my PC Mag readers if they have a blog they want
linked. This is only done as an exercise to further ruin the
Google mechanism if it isn’t ruined enough already.

Anyway, here is my rationale for the blog:

— I’ve always been a believer in knowing about something
before you criticize it. Often that means being in the community
somehow, even as a lurker. This allows me to continue to criticize
without hearing “try it, and you’ll like it” or “what does he know
about it anyway?”

— I’ve noticed that I do broadcast emailing to friends and
in those emails I’m writing on and on about something. I’ve always
complained that bloggers are writing for free and that it’s
stupid. Meanwhile I’m writing these broadcast emails for no money,
why not blog them and get no money that way? Makes sense to me in
some convoluted way.

— Every so often I go off-topic in a column and the column
has to be shelved. I used to write op-eds for a daily newspaper
and this was a way to get this stuff off my chest. There were also
some regional magazines I’ve written for that would take these
diatribes. Now I have no outlet for them and, to be honest, the
wife and kids are sick of listening to me at the dinner table. So
I’m relenting and putting this stuff in a blog to get it off my
chest. Sorry. I apologize for that.

— Lost Columns. I’ve been working on a book of lost
columns. These are columns that are out-of-print and not online
anyplace. There are at least 7 that are worth re-reading.
People are always asking me about certain old columns. This now
includes almost a decade worth of thoughtful online columns done
for PC Magazine when we were owned by Softbank and were all
published on the ZDNet sites and since removed. I have reprint
rights and I’m going to dig through these old tomes and put
together an archive. Why not?

— Learning new skills. I’m moving right to WordPress
software (considered by many to be the
blogging software of the future) and this forces me to learn CSS
(cascading style sheets) and PHP (PHP Hypertext Preprocessor). I
can tell you already that I don’t like these systems and the tools
available do not help. Although everyone tells me I’m a lazy weenie
for whining about this. I realized that once I learned HTML I
haven’t done anything but play with toys. It’s ridiculous not to
know this stuff cold if you’re going to be writing about it.

— I do spend more time online than the average reader and
run into lots of interesting stuff that needs to be more widely
distributed. This is a start. In the process it serves as a
database for these discoveries. An annotated link can be much more
easily tracked down when you want to revisit it if you use a
blogging database as opposed to rifling through endless bookmarks.

— Fun factor. I did the side blog on Boing-Boing a year back
or so. And it was fun. So why not?

Now you know.