As the new year approaches, an email has arrived inviting me to renew the hosting account for “The Enormous Waste of Webspace” - the site that has housed my personal blog on the internet for the past ten months or so. I’m wondering what benefits are really derived from hosting my own blog. The temptation to transfer the posts to a generic wordpress blog is a strong one.

The wider question involves the commitment we make to maintaining our foothold on the internet - do we build our own island, or entrust the content we create to others? The rational part of my mind tells me that maintaining more than is absolutely necessary is somewhat foolhardy. Why try to own any facet of my online existence?

Moving back to a blog hosted by Automattic (owners of Wordpress) would also absolve me from maintaining the latest version of the software. Something else I can offload to others, freeing me to concentrate on content, and sharing my thoughts and experiences with the community.

Talking of community, I have also been swayed recently by a return to LiveJournal, and unlikely new friendships. Where blogs are very much an island inhabited by the individual, LiveJournal has fostered “the community”, and feels very different because of that. Sure, it’s clunky and idiosyncratic, but it’s strengths outweigh it’s failings. The same can be said about Twitter - a community that seemed to explode around me in the last weeks of this year. Twitter shouldn’t succeed, and yet it does - and it’s fun. It doesn’t try to do too much.

So.

The coming weeks could well see the end of “The Enormous Waste of Webspace” in it’s current form. It will no doubt continue as “jonbecket73.wordpress.com“, and notice will be given when (and if) it happens. My output will still be an enormous waste of webspace, but not my webspace. For the forseeable future, one thing is certain - I will continue to write. Granted, my words will continue to carry little or no useful purpose for the world at large, but they will entertain my fingers during the more dull moments of the day, and perhaps your idle mind while reading them from time to time.

Everything changes. Embrace it.

Many moons ago I was a member of LiveJournal (and blogger, and wordpress, and twitter, and identi.ca, and MySpace, and Vox). Invariably the reason for joining the various services was a mixture of curiousity, and to interact with friends using those services.

With curiosity firmly in mind, I have returned to LiveJournal this morning to take a look (and to reclaim the username I once held there).

I have been pleasantly surprised - while the architecture of LiveJournal hasn’t changed, the experience isn’t as bad as I remember (the architecture’s consistency is perhaps because of their new ownership - following the original creators building “Vox”, which caused something of a temporal rift in the LiveJournal user community).

It’s easy to forget just how popular LiveJournal once was - before the rise of Blogger and Wordpress, many hundreds of thousands of people regularly wrote journals on LiveJournal, subscribed and contributed to self created groups, and forged true online communities.

The world that blogging has evolved into seems to be much more about the individual rather than the community, and while both are valid it often feels that writing a blog is a very lonely activity.

I shall explore LiveJournal over the next few weeks when opportunity presents itself, and write again soon about my experiences.

If you would like to join me, feel free to add me as a friend - my homepage is http://jonbeckett73.livejournal.com.

After receiving no feedback whatsoever, I took the slightly risky move last night of registering the domain name anyway because it was available - and once I had the domain name, it seemed a shame not to use it. You can therefore trudge over to the following shiny new website;

The Community of Bloggers
www.communityofbloggers.com

As many will know, and I mentioned yesterday, I created this community a couple of years ago but never gave it a proper home on the internet. While searching for any kind of blog writing community on Google a couple of days ago I was somewhat shocked to discover that none existed - or at least nothing sensible was returned while searching for “Blogging Community”.

Feel free to go and register, and ask questions, post tips, and of course pimp your own blog.

A couple of years ago I built a forum - mainly because people asked me to - for people who write blogs to create their own community. It never had it’s own domain name, or a real “identity” as such, and so eventually fell by the wayside.

I’m wondering about re-creating it, and inviting the world and it’s blogging dog to take part.

What do you think?

Would you like to take part in a community of bloggers? Be able to swap ideas, tips, ask questions, share experiences?

Do you ever wonder why on earth you write a blog?

I do.

Sometimes I have so much to say, and no time to write - at other times I want to write, but have nothing to say.

Go figure.

I have been playing with Tumblr on the internet for the last few days, and it’s been liberating.

I think perhaps the secret to Tumblr is that it doesn’t support comments by default. Sure, you can add them (via Disqus, for example), but the lack of feedback turns out to be important. Or at least, it’s important if you see blogging in the same light that I do.

I publish on the internet to share - I am not here to draw attention to myself. I am not here necessarily to pass judgment either. I might make observations from time to time, but they are my observations and not intended with any malice.

In many ways the blogging community has changed since the early days. The masses have brought with them the “me me” mentality - “look at me - look at what I have written - look at my photos - look at my blog!”. It’s a shame. Blogging (at least for me) used to be about sharing your experiences and thoughts with an unknown audience.

In recent years many employers have begun to trace both potential and existing staff’s blogs, social network accounts and blog posts. Having any kind of public voice is starting to be seen as a threat. It would appear the cyclical nature of the world is returning to the 1950s. Towing the line is becoming increasingly important. Saying the right thing. Keeping in line with expectations.

Expectations are not the sole preserve of the professional world either. The concept of “ownership of information” is becoming more important to individuals too. I have noticed a lot of blog authors relate their family disputes online. It’s incredibly stupid and dangerous. Everybody from Great Aunt Maud to Cousin Billy Bob has access to the internet, and they WILL find you. Especially if they are involved… they WILL read the entire history of everything you have written too.

Perhaps the web, blogging, and social networks as we have known them are growing up - experiencing a “loss of innocence”. The frontier spirit that encompassed the earliest settlers is slowly being eroded by the self important masses, who bring with them all the problems of real society and relationships.

Those of us who arrived early have an itch to scratch. We will journey on - finding new forms of communication - sharing - forming community - trying again. We will be followed eventually, and all that we have begun will be slowly destroyed. And so the story will continue.

Being the inquisitive sort of chap that I am, I often find myself trying out new things on the internet, and wondering how I might make use of them. While this blog, the “Enormous Waste of Webspace” might be termed my “blog”, I have recently been toying with both Tumblr and Posterous.

You may recall that I looked at Tumblr once before - and ended up not doing anything with it.

I think I have a use for it now though - you might call it “anything except Twitter”.

Twitter is very public. It’s kind of like text messaging the world. I wanted some kind of record of “what I’ve been up to” so I can look back and recall what I was working on each day. At timesheet time, I’ve discovered this method of working is invaluable. Twitter is an obvious candidate for this task, but I’m sure those who follow my twitter posts (over 200 of you!) have absolutely no interest in my various battles with C#, SQL, PHP, SharePoint, Javascript, and so on.

A little lightbulb appeared above my head and switched on. Tumblr. Perfect. It lets me post text, photos, quotes and anything else I deem “remember-worthy” into a record that I can look back on. It’s public, but I have no problem with that - I have nothing to hide.

At the same time I was playing with Tumblr, a new web startup appeared - Posterous. Similar in many respects to Tumblr, but it’s visitor interface is fixed (you can monkey with Tumblr). It’s primarily designed to be posted to via email, and it displays media files wonderfully. If you were looking for a no-nonsese photo, video or sound blog, Posterous hits all the nails on the head.

I seem to have quite accidentally found myself using Wordpress, Tumblr, Posterous and Twitter.

• Wordpress (in the guise of this blog) is great for long think pieces - like this one.
• Tumblr is great for posts no longer than a short paragraph - mainly to myself as reminders - although others may indeed find them entertaining.
• Posterous is great to post photos for sharing with the world and it’s dog. Random snaps you otherwise would not have deemed interesting enough for Flickr, or a blog post.
• Twitter is great to elicit responses from your peers. A single sentence cast out to the interwebs and whoever may be watching.

One of the “issues” with dumping information in so many places is how you might follow somebody that does so. Easy - FriendFeed.

Friendfeed provides an aggregated feed of everything I write, say and post across all services I have chosen to include. It also lets me follow the firehose of information coming from all of my friends. Even if people are not members, I can add “imaginary” versions of themselves and attach their known feeds. It’s very clever, and has supplanted Google Reader as my main means of keeping up with the world.

I have finally found a place for the wonderful “Posterous” service that I wrote about several days ago.

For those who have no idea, Posterous is a blogging platform that works via email - you just send an email to post@posterous.com and it creates you a blog, makes a post out of the email, and arranges attachments nicely (so, for example, if you attached a photo it will appear nicely sized in the post and open a lightbox style view when you click on it).

Here’s my Posterous page…

If you have a mobile phone with a camera, and the facility to email the photos you take, you have an instant mobile blogging platform - or “moblog”, as the blogging masses like to term it. I know you can do the same trick in Vox, Wordpress et al, but they are all far more fiddly to set up than just sending an email.

I guess this means that “The Enormous Waste of Webspace” will remain as the main repository of my thoughts and opinions, but my corner of Posterous (jonbeckett73.posterous.com) will house the numerous photos I take as I wander the earth - purely because it takes very little effort to do so.

I’m sat here wondering if I might be able to find a use for Posterous. Normally I write here at “The Enormous Waste of Webspace“, but Posterous is persuasive… perhaps even more so than Tumblr.

We appear to have four levels of blog platform now;

• Micro Blogs (Twitter, Identica)
• Mini Blogs (Posterous, Tumblr)
• Hosted Blogs (Wordpress, Blogger)
• Independants (installed copies of Wordpress, Moveable Type, etc)

The next few years are going to be interesting - considering that nobody thought “blogging” would last as long as it has. I guess if you give people a communication medium, they do what people do - communicate - find each other.

The best friendships I have were forged on the internet. They were unlikely, they happened by chance, but we found each other.

If you write regularly, it is inevitable that you will run out of inspiration from time to time. A few movies have stayed with me over the years that leave me wanting to write.

In no particular order;

Finding Forrester

Dangerous Minds

Dead Poets Society