Why start a blog? I've been thinking about it for some time. But what's the point? Answering that is perhaps a good starting point essay for this site.
First, I have always tried to stay on the bleeding edge of technology, living, so far as I can, in the future. Blogs are clearly one of the current technology waves in social computing. Maybe that wave will wash back out to sea with the next tide, or maybe it will leave a key piece of structure for the future of online social interaction. Either way, being in it and helping to create it (in content if not structure) is the only way to learn about it at a gut level. And only by internalizing it that way is it possible to intellectually build on top of it to foresee what will come next.
Second, after thirty five years in the field, I think I have some insights into and some history of computers, networking, user interface, social computing, etc., that some people would find interesting and even useful. Who those people are and how they'll ever manage to find this blog is another problem, but not the immediate one. Getting some of those stories and ideas down in writing is a good start, and publishing them online at least makes it possible for people to access them.
Third, I've realized recently that I have forever missed large pieces of my parents' lives. While I know a story here and a factoid there, I never sat them down and had them tell me their life stories. Now that they're both dead (and have been for years), I never can. I can imagine my own children coming to the same conclusion after I'm gone. So I think it's worthwhile recording some of my life. Since myself and my life are largely about computers, there's a large overlap between this point and the previous one.
Fourth, a friend and ex-co-worker of mine, Sarah Allen, dropped by for lunch the other day. She spent a chunk of that lunch telling me about her blog, and how much fun she was having with it. Her enthusiasm was infectious.
Finally, I had an insight into net publishing: it's different than paper publishing (duh). One of the things that held me back from doing a blog was the thought that it's damned egotistical of me to think that the world is interested in what I have to type. But that's a feeling born in print economics, not online publishing. In print, it's expensive to produce and distribute a magazine, so the stuff in it had better be valuable. In print, you get whatever the editor chose to include, so that choice had better be sensitive to the reader's sense of what's valuable. So in print, you have to believe what you're saying is valuable enough to pay for the trees it's printed on and the gas it takes to deliver it and the time you're stealing from the reader. Publishing trivia or things of limited readership is bad. Having published previously in print media, I was stuck with print sensibilities. But online, it's pretty nearly free to publish and distribute, readers can pick and chose beyond the choices made for them by an editor, and groups can form around topics that to them are valuable but to everyone else is drivel. So it's not egotistical to publish, only to pre-assume that anyone will actually read it.
Why "Meme Motes?"
This blog was named in the same way every other project I've ever christened was named: once I know what it's about and have thought about the content for a while, I open my mind and wait for a name to pop into it. If something good pops into my head in the next couple of hours, that's it. If nothing pops, experience shows it never will and you might as well name the thing "project 3 of 2005."
"Meme" comes from Richard Dawkins concept of self-propagating ideas that use us to replicate. "Mote" comes from a speck of dust. I see the essays and stories on this site as ideas that swirl around and make pretty patterns in the light that the reader's perspective brings to them. They can intertwine, they can dance, they can be beautiful. Or they can fall to the ground in the dark and be just so much dirt. It all depends on the perspective.
So I hope you enjoy these pieces, whoever you are. It's up to you to make them dance.
