Starting the experiment

Saturday, 16 Jul 2005 | Blogging

For the last couple of years I’ve been wearily following the development of the phenomena called ‘blogging’. I had seen the rise of the personal journals on the web and thought it was an interesting idea, but also saw the increasing amount of homepages with pictures of cats. It really was only at the beginning of this year when I started reading a couple of blogs regularly, that I became genuinely intrigued with the concept. For a little while there, the web was turning into an extension of the corporations of this world. Blogging is one of the many things that together are giving the web back to it’s rightful owner: the people of this world.

I’ve always loved writing informally about a lot of different subjects and polluting my friends’ mailboxes with it. And I had been considering starting a blog as an outlet of these writings. But being the perfectionist that I am, I felt I did not have enough of interesting stuff to write about and so have no started a blog so far.

When I started to think about moving to Asia, there were a million things that sprung to mind. I was overwhelmed with the idea of all the things I needed to think about and take care of. I started talking to friends about it. And suddenly I figured this was the perfect opportunity for me to give blogging a try. And so, ‘sixtysix’ was born.

One of the reasons I decided to give blogging a try is because with ‘sixtysix’ I have a specific subject to write about. And I’ve always found that blogs on a subject make for more interesting reading for a focussed group of readers. In this case, the target audience is mainly friends and family and perhaps at a later stage other people as well. Using a blog as a complimentary medium to keep friends and family informed about the progress I’m making is worth testing. I have no clue if it will be succesful. The fact that blogging is new to a lot of my audience probably will not help.

That is why the other reason for setting up this blog is perhaps even more important to me personally. On the site I can store countless amounts of notes, thoughts and other writings. They will always be there for future reference. In some cases that in itself is useful. In other cases writing the article will force me to think things through and put the essence into writing. I think that will help me tremendously in this process.

But all in all, this is an experiment. Let’s just see how it goes.