Ben Laurie blathering

Anyone who knows me knows I hate blogs. So, what the fuck am I doing, starting one up?

Well, I’ve come to realise that there’s a point to blogs, too. I still hate almost all of them. I don’t want to know about your relationships, or what you ate for dinner last night. And don’t expect me to meet you for drinks because you blogged where you were going.

But they are a good place for doing some things. For example, where would I put my brief article on primes and MD5 collisions if not in a blog? (You’ll see from the date I’ve flirted with this idea before). They’re also a kind of person-centric mailing list – only you don’t have to subscribe to them and they stay available forever. Perhaps they’re good for other things, but I can’t think of any right now. Let me know!

Anyway, consider this an experiment. The next few posts are probably going to be a little odd, because they’ll be about stuff I should’ve been blogging at the time, but, well, I didn’t have a blog. Will I keep it up? Who knows. Watch this space.

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on Thursday, September 15th, 2005 at 16:46 and is filed under General.
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5 Comments

Hey Ben,

I though you were never going to move beyond your somewhat spartan homepage…

just don’t think of it as a “blog”, or yourself as a “blogger”. Worked for me, until I finally accepted the facts — that that’s what a good proportion of the “blogosphere” is also doing, anyway…

On top of the two uses you mention, there’s a third, which is as a place to put what Pavel Curtis used to call “lectures” in LambdaMOO, iirc; in other words, if you find yourself repeatedly discussing the same topics, a weblog gives you a place to write your take coherently, annotate with links, and then post a single URL each time it crops up. Similar to a personal FAQ, basically.

Don’t even try to fake it. My recipes and mini videos are the highlight of your day – just go ahead
and tell it like it is. I had fun learning how to pick locks with ya at Seattle Mind Camp. You
security guys are a hoot. Be sure and post on your blog when you’ll next be in Seattle so we can hook
up for drinks.