In early October two years ago, we had a party. During that evening, a journalist friend helped my wife set up a (pseudonymous, s3kr1t) blog on Blogspot which persists to this day.
I didn’t catch on immediately. I’d been a BBS aficionado since the late 80s, regularly spending an hour or two a day conversing on-line. But after two months of reading my wife’s blog, I started to feel that maybe blogging might be something for me too. After all, I was already writing on-line anyway, but for a small audience of longtime BBS friends who didn’t necessarily share my obsessions. Also, the BBS format neither permitted illustrations nor invited longer pieces. (In fact, BBSes taught me compact argumentation to avoid boring the readers, a skill I have found very useful as an academic.)
Two years ago to the day I wrote my first blog entry, and when I had amassed a little collection I went public and e-mailed my friends about what I was doing. For two years now I’ve blogged pretty much daily, dropping out of my old BBS hangout and concentrating those evening hours on blogging instead. The other day, somebody characterised my blog as “quirky and popular … opinionated”. I can live with that!