participatory geekiness

September 03, 2003

#1 reason that I created this weblog was to experiment with new technology. Okay, in March 2003 weblogs were hardly new tech, but they were for me. The blog was also not the central them of the site, but just one of many such experiments.

Sometimes you need to participate in something to understand it. At the time I was thinking more about learning Perl than the social experiment of blogging, but I’m open to learning unexpected lessons.

It is good to have a place to play. There’s a lot I can do right here on my own desktop, but it changes how I create stuff when there’s an audience. Even when its an audience of three, as it was in the early days, just going through the extra effort of making it work for someone else changes the experience. There is also no substitute for participation in understanding the nuances of a medium.

A blog is a comfortable sidebar for my experiment of the moment. The only comparable forum is the cube-side demo — grabbing a colleague for an impromptu “hey check this out” — which acheives a similar camraderie, but lacks the temporal independence and low impact of a blog entry.