So I’ve been using the word “blog” as an everyday verb (ex: “I’m so totally blogging that”) since 2000. The first one was a hand-coded HTML page which just got longer as I wrote things at the top. I think I was 17. Since then I’ve had more blogs than I can actually remember, often 2 or 3 at a time (several of them in collaboration with Bec). I became concerned about the possible negative effects that it could have on my life after a friend and a couple high-profile bloggers got fired from their jobs because of their blogs. No one beyond hard-core blog believers seemed to see the things as a professional asset.

To protect myself from unanticipated repercussions, I went underground: either secret URLS that only my friends knew (not linked from other sites), or with friends-only protection in places like LJ and social networking sites. Always anonymous, of course, with my name never appearing anywhere in the text. Interspersed over the years there were a couple server-crashing and password-forgetting episodes which effectively wiped out my archived online history.

Since then, blogging software has improved by orders of magnitude,* and blogs have become 6-figure-book-deal kinds of legitimate. They’re widely recognized as professional-development tools and are becoming de rigueur for techy-designy fields. So I decided it was time to start blogging in the public sphere again. As a designer and computer-enhanced person I want to start building up my google shadow (after reducing it to almost nothing) with the awesome stuff I’ve found, pictures I’ve taken, etc. Maybe it’ll get me a job or more friends or help me actualize my inner potential. Mark Busse told my Professional Practices class that it would.

So here we go. This is everything, all the time, forever until the end of the internet.

*unfortunately, still haven’t found a “make footnote” button.