Freeform Jazz, Man

I think my first “blog” was actually the front page of my website that I updated really frequently — this was in about 1996, shortly after I graduated from featuring a skewered dove (from a The The album, see it here) as my homepage background. The front page would change every week or so with some insights into my day, my job, my shoes, whathaveyou. I didn’t put much thought into what I wrote, and I didn’t really imagine anyone out there, reading it.

Once I began using Blogger, Livejournal, and other tools, I got more serious about what I wrote. These formats allowed me to keep old copies of what I wrote – archives. Instead of writing over the same file over and over again, I was leaving a little Jen trail across the Internet. I started keeping different blogs – a professional one, one about living abroad, my personal blog, and then another blog thrown in just for good measure. Each blog was a compartment, and I doled out my posts to the appropriate place with care.

Speed ahead a bit, to a time when I still want to keep a blog, but I’m really not sure what to write about. I know what I like to read. I read a lot of really entertaining, more personal blogs – I love those. I read plenty of RSS feeds from professional, entertainment, and design blogs – I like those, too. I was worrying over a blog for work for some time, so that made me want to write in this guy about as much as I wanted to say, rub my teeth on some tin foil.

The point of this rambling is simple: I need to decide what to write about, and even more to the point, I need to decide where my (matured) level of comfort lies with writing personal things. In the midst of 193830 social networking sites, I guess this is a pretty old fashioned kind of quandry, but still, it’s one I’m puzzling through.