A lot has been going on here lately; personal, business, you name it. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the internet, social media, blogging and the effects these things can have on a person. Yep…a person, not a business or SEO or whatever other web 2.0 buzzwords are out there. When I started “blogging” back in 2003 I had one thing in mind: Sharing my personal thoughts, photos, feelings, rants & raves with whomever may want to read and look at them. When I started, I wasn’t using a “proper” blogging platform. Nope, I designed my own Flash based platform that offered no option for comments (screenshot below). A few people said “Jebb, you gotta get comments on this thing”. One or two said, “Jebb, you better be glad you don’t have comments on there”. Comments?! What did I care about comments…this thing is for ME. If THEY didn’t like it, THEY didn’t have to read it. Well then I saw the advantage fun of having comments so I left my little Flash blog behind and moved to Blogger.com. I stuck with that until recently when I moved everything to this self hosted WordPress blog. Great…so we got the platform thing out of the way, what’s your point Mr. Graff?

Screenshot of very first blog design I made…in Flash no less. A little more personal eh?

Well, this may need to be a series, because I think I have several points. First one up…guilt.

Guilt:
Guilt doesn’t belong on the internet. I’ve started so many posts, tweets, Myspace blogs etc. with “Sorry I’ve neglected my [insert social media platform here] but I’m so [insert excuse here]”. You know…I shouldn’t feel any guilt whatsoever about not blogging. The truth is, I love my wife, my family & my friends. If I’ve missed a week or two of “internetting” (from here on out I’m going to refer to being present on the internet as “internetting” for the purposes of brevity…unlike this statement) then chances are I’ve been busy doing things that I’ve deemed more important. Shocking right? But if you don’t blog, your SEO will suffer and your this that and the other thing will suffer and your man bits will fall off! So be it. I’m done feeling like I owe the internet some boring statement just to be present. I could technically blog everyday, but the posts would be so boring at least three small children would instantly become octogenarians. That’s a fact just Google it or Wiki it or whatever…just don’t email me the meme when it becomes one. So yeah…no more guilt from me. I’ll get a new post up when there is something I feel is worthy of posting. It may not be good, but it’ll be something I truly wanted to share. Isn’t truth more appealing than filler anyway?

I think that’ll be enough for now…next one up whenever it strikes me. ;)

-JG