Weblog New Zealand

As someone with multiple blogs I occasionally get asked why I blog and what I get out of it. This is an attempt to explain the why, a little of the what will naturally creep in.

Years ago, when I was a teenager I was in a cohort a few years after the hippies and 1960s counterculture and like any teen admiring the older teens and young adults I used to admire the underground press. In the dieing days of the New Zealand underground press I managed to buy a complete collection of Earwig ... I think I walked in just as they were clearing out the press office, there was never another issue, so if it wasn't then it was soon after ... If anyone from Earwig reads this, I treasured those magazines for years & still have them somewhere.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s I used to post on bulletin boards and Usenet ... bulletin boards had a limited distribution and (at the time) Usenet was ephemeral ... of course all that Usenet got preserved and I can find old posts of mine under old aliases from time-to-time. One of the things I wrote back then was my infamous ADD 1 TO COBOL GIVING COBOL which I lost for years and then found in one of those Usenet archives.

When blogging came out, I realised it was a way to have my say, without the forced limited distribution of either small circulation paper or local bulletin boards and without the transitory nature of Usenet. Of course, you have to get your blog noticed, but that's not a great price, leave anything worthwhile up long enough and someone will visit it.

For the last 6 years I've blogged on-and off. Currently I have a few active blogs. I started with just one that was intended as a dear diary type site and it became a mishmash of that and several other strands. I ended up splitting it into 3 blogs, the original, one for my political and social views and one about my interest in Internet Domain names. Since then I've added a couple of special purpose blogs. One on software patents and one on weight loss, The software patents one is a bit erratic but OK as far as it goes while the weight loss one is compete rubbish.

Every so often I go away from blogging & come back. When I do the blogs are there and I can write what I like to the world. That freedom to say my mind is what keeps me blogging.