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At Long Last, Blog

Aug 23, 2004

I have long resisted blogging (web-logging). I'm accustomed to writing polished newsletters and web pages for large public audiences, and I prefer to keep my standards high even with a much-reduced audience. Blogs can be lazy, often dashed off with little regard for structure, style, grammar, spelling - or consequences. It's slightly horrifying that teachers are using blogs to get kids to write for school - where will these kids learn to write a good, old-fashioned essay?

There are hundreds of thousands of blogs out there, most of them read by, and of interest to, only a small circle of the writer's friends and/or relatives. There are a few by people whose lives are so fascinating (e.g. Lt. Smash, when he was still in Iraq) or whose random thoughts are so interesting that I'm willing to put up with the format. Some blogs are collections of clips and pointers to other sites and stories. unmediated is one such, very useful in my current area of investigation (video).

In the online marketing journals that I skim, I've been seeing stories about company blogs used for PR/marketing, something I might well have done had blogging been more popular during my Adaptec/Roxio days. Online marketing has been a big part of my career, and I'm currently doing marketing as my (last) MBA course, so it behooves me to explore this medium.

I learn best by doing, ergo it's time to do a blog. But I didn't want to just transfer my newsletters to a blog format. A blog is linear, organized chronologically, and best suited (I feel) to a single topic, while my articles are all over the place in both subject and style. On a well-structured website (as mine strives to be), visitors can choose what they want to read according to their individual interests. The structure of a blog assumes that everything the writer has to say is equally interesting to everyone - an assumption I find arrogant.

So I decided to blog about food - I cook, or at least eat, every day, so there's always something to say, and I'm passionate about food. And I have pictures. And video, eventually.

later

It was an interesting experiment, but I realized I don't have time to maintain a blog as well as this site, so I moved all the food stuff onto this site, and will continue adding material about food, eating, and cooking as it arises.