Navel gazing

What am I doing here?

When I started up Hobbsblog back in November of 2000, I really thought I was waaaay behind the curve with the whole blogging thing. I had been keeping track of some good bloggers for awhile (like Robotwisdom, which is still, inexplicably, going) and Jack Saturn's (which is not, for quite some time) and figured that I'd just bandwagon jump for a bit and be done with it. But a funny thing happened on the way to the blogosphere¹; everyone and their dog got a blog, and blogging itself got associated with a phenomenon that a lot of people, myself included, found pretty distasteful. Yes, I'm talking about politics.

It's hard for a page that is designed to be a repository for one's personal thoughts to not become political, if one is intensely interested in the subject (that's as good as a mea culpa as you're going to get from me. Despite my current inclinations, I can't guarantee I won't go off on some spittle-flecked invective the next time some idiot politician or judge does something reprehensible). And yes, I understand the need for some non-commercial news sources, and some bloggers do politics well. But along the way, the more that "blog" stood for the chickenhawk vs. liberal raver scene, the more I started really hating that word.

It's partly for this reason that I started euphemistically calling the previous versions of the site "HB" as opposed to the given title, Hobbsblog. Yet, what is a weblog, anyway? In its purest form, a weblog is simply a log that a given author keeps on or of the web. Back in 2000, there was a raging debate as to whether people with "web diaries" could call their sites "blogs", but such pedantry has faded into the digital ether. With any luck, I can get over my distaste for the terminology by just ignoring the ass-hats, and posting three times a week of my thoughts on things and maybe an interesting site or two.

I certainly have learned what the value of this site is. It's not to keep friends and family updated, it's not to convince anyone of anything, and it certainly isn't to buff my resume. It's as a personal archive of what I was thinking at any given moment in history, and if anyone else wants to peek in on the process, well, have fun with that.

Try it

For a while, I attempted to keep my link-log at del.icio.us, but at this point I have way too many things going, so I think I'm just going to go back to the ol' links at the end of my posts format. This one is primarily for my brother Kevin: The Jumpman page at Wiki. I have played many video games in my day, but there are few I like better than some of the old, well executed games from back in The Day. Jumpman was a game we had on our Commodore 64, and remains one of my all time favorites.

Some of the Jumpman rigs that people have made are just awesome. *coughcough* Christmas is still a long way off....

1. What happened with the word 'blogosphere' pretty much sums up what went wrong with blogging. My good internet buddy Brad, in making fun of the term 'blog' coined that word as a laundry list of silliness that was perhaps inevitable with the way it was being used. A few years later, some conservative re-coined the term and MEANT IT, and then demanded credit.

Focus and purpose

I've long thought about restarting regular blogging, and writing everyday on the Woodyblog has done the opposite of sucking up all my potential writing time; it's actually making me want to write more, and not have to be constrained by having to talk about that (*waves hands*) situation.

So, here's the deal. I think I'm going to divide my web-related creativity as follows:

a) Hobbsblog, which will, as per my usual pattern, get a number bump (up to IV) and a new template¹ upon commencing regular postings.
b) Woodyblog, which will continue on the set pattern of daily posts about Woody and related topics (Maggie has, as of today, been added as an author there, and I will start standing aside for her on certain days).
c) The Voxblog, which just started this week, which will be used for two purposes: 1. a redundant backup for any moving pictures I shoot, and 2. mobile blogging from the Treo, which will probably be picture + caption/explanation format.
d) Flickr, as a still picture repository.
e) Youtube, for moving pictures.

1. I'm actually considering dusting off and slightly updating a vintage site design, like this one, as seen on February 23, 2001. I sure wish I'd had the intelligence to save my templates back then, instead of having to re-invent them.