I’ve been blogging for much longer than the word has existed. Search the Internet archive and it does not go back far enough. Check out my Lotus Elise site and you can see I started regular publishing on the web in 1997 but, some of my earlier contributions pre-date that by more than two years.
So why has it taken me so long to start a proper blog? The answer is simply that it has taken the tools this long to catch up with my home-brewed tools, that enabled me to publish efficiently on the web. What started out as a learning exercise in Perl migrated to Java further back than I care to remember and evolved into a powerful text-based, web site managment tool that I’ve been using ever since.
The tools that have emerged in the last few years also managed to alienate me with their excessive focus on geeky features and data presentation, they simply forgot about the value of the actual content within the page. Even now, some of the blogs I come across have pages where the real content is less than 20% of the screen estate. Many, many years ago the phrase ‘content is king’ was coined. At the time I found it far too corny but, it was true. And then the whole way content was created and consumed on the Internet changed and for a long time it was no longer true.
But it is now true again, though not in any way approaching the meaning that applied when the phrase was first coined. The ‘content’ is now something much bigger than ever existed before. It’s not about formats. It is now dynamic, user generated, it’s social, it’s collaborative and it’s sometimes real-time.
Content is back as the king once more. And now it’s time to do my bit and blog in the truest sense of the word.
