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It still beats watching Must See TV
At the last Seattle Weblogger Meetup there was a very nice reporter from the Seattle PI who is working on a piece on blogging so she had a email questionnaire for me.
1. How long have you been blogging?
I published my first post on 8BitJoystick.com on May 22, 2002 11:45 PM. Since then I have posted 1540 articles and people have made 9399 comments. I was linked to by several top new sites like the BBC and I am listed in Yahoo as a magazine. it is still a lot of fun and is sort of more productive than watching TV.
2. How'd you get into it?
An ex-girlfriend of mine started a blog in 2001 and since it was the end of the great dot-com crash. It seemed interesting and a way to create content on the internet for fun rather than flogging the dying dot com madness. The irony is I just put my first banner ads up on 8Bitjoystick.com to cover the publishing and hosting cost. I guess time will eventually change everything. I have been using a computer for years and it is quite natural to use it as a journal or an extension of one intellectually. I knew how to type in MacWrite before I knew how to write cursive and I knew MacPaint before I knew how to paint on a canvas. This makes sense to me.
3. Why meet up with the other bloggers in the group? What do you get out of those meetings?
The meetings are a good way of telling yourself that you are not nuts and there are other people that are obsessed with creating and sharing content online. Birds of a feather get together to rant about RSS I guess. It is nice to meet people who sites you read and to find new people to read. It is the other kind of networking. The one that does not involve Wifi or Ethernet.
4. What do you usually talk about at these meetings?
The technology, politics, habbits, and implementation of the personal Internet and how it is changing things. There are some pretty deep discussion but also it is just a good excuse to get to meet new people and see like minded friends.
What's the best thing about your blog and your experience doing it?
Internet publishing is a way of spreading idea. Steve Jobs of Apple is rumored to have said that he wishes that his computers help more people write their congressmen than help the Pentagon to build more bombs. Shared ideas is the start of all political thought and political change. In internet is in the process changing our concepts of entertainment, news and community. This is not off in some distant time but it is all ready happening.
Another way of looking at this is I am going to put this questionnaire on my website once I am done with it. This will hit the web long before the Seattle PI article is published but I don't have an editor going over this and picking out a line or two to include as quote. An internet site like this can reach a global audience very quickly and the size and content of an article does not have to conform to an box to make room for the next article. I can say "Fuck" if I want to. Once you get into online publishing the whole concept of staining dead tree pulp with an automated press and physically handing them out to people in a limited geographic area seems a bit weird.
It still beats watching "Must See TV".
Jake at August 22, 2005 
WebDev
