Why a blog?

I love surfing for news and commentary on the web. Sometime ago I discovered a trick for clipping and saving interesting articles using Netscape or Mozilla: Right-click on the page, select "Send Page....", then when the e-mail composer pops up, click save, and then close the window. Sometimes I edit the subject line to make it more useful to me, or I insert a particularly apt quote as a preface. The article is saved to the "Drafts" mail folder with the webpage attached, and from there I can file it by category or search for text. Much more useful than printing out hardcopy and filing it somewhere.

Although I use the Mozilla mail program to do this, rarely if ever do I actually e-mail the article to a friend. Although I don't mind getting forwarded links that a friend thinks I'll find interesting, I hate to intrude on someone else's mailbox too often. A handful of times I have blasted out an article en masse to my address book, and I've received positive feedback each time, with friends thanking me for keeping them informed, and some saying they'd like to hear from me regularly. So how to do this without wearing out my welcome?

Then I discovered web logs, blogs for short. First was "The Corner", the group blog on National Review's website. They kept linking to someone called Instapundit, the gateway to the blogosphere. From there I found Little Green Footballs, USS Clueless, Eject! Eject! Eject! and many, many others -- links to interesting news stories accompanied by a short description, a brief comment, or sometimes an essay inspired by an item in the news. Other sites were more personal in nature -- "what I did today", but written with style -- the Bleat on lileks.com is a favorite.

Blogs solved my quandary -- I could blast one e-mail to friends and family, point them to my site, and they could visit and read as much or as little as they pleased. I don't want to be intrusive, but if you want to know what I'm thinking about today, here it is. Come and get it!