I’d heard about it a little, to the point I knew they existed. I was pretty sure I stumbled across a few while finding my way through a deep dark goggle search on character encodings and reading double-byte characters from an xml file. Of course I’m talking about the current blogging phenomenon.

For awhile I didn’t really care to understand it. The ones I saw seemed really disorganized, hard to grasp. I didn’t even know why they existed. Sort of like webrings, still don’t know what the heck those are or what purpose they serve, except to drive traffic to your site so you can get hits on all your banners. I just avoid em, smells like network marketing to me. No, I don’t want to buy perfume that smells just like my favorite name brand. Good luck selling those out of the trunk of your car.

I love forums though. Well organized content and threads, well defined topic(purpose), easy to determine if I’m somewhere that may have the answers I’m looking for. Ah, I just answered my own question. I’ll come back to that.

Lately I’ve been on a mission to redesign (or finally design) the Insight Galactic site and bring it back to life. There were a few catalysts for this sudden inspiration, but one was the discovery of RSS feeds. This solved a long standing problem for Insight, generating enough fresh content. Now I could fill my site with self-updating content from throughout the web. And it was all delivered in a standard format, making it easy for me to integrate this content into my site.

I could feel it coming on, the sort of inspiration that would throw me into a madly focused quest, consumed by a need to understand all that is RSS. And that lead to foray’s into online photoshop tutorials and trists with CSS and DHTML . But really, I don’t have an addictive personality, just an occasional thirst for knowledge. Well alright, how about if ignorance is bliss, I’m pretty miserable.
Ok let me get back to blogging, well almost back. So I was looking around the internet for RSS feeds highlighting alternative music, when I ran into my next great inspiration, Podcasting. Oh yeah, now this was sweet. Subscribe to old school newsfeeds but they are really mp3 files that I could have an aggregator download overnight, and in the morning they would magically sync into my iPod and off I go with my day’s content. Very cool. Except I don’t have an iPod, but that’s another post.
But I saw the possibilities and off I went into my incontrollable spiral in search of all knowledge that is podcasting. And as it turns out, podcasting is just an application of the RSS2.0 spec that allows enclosures. Think email with attachments. Sweet, RSS feeds that allow mp3’s to be attached. Ok this is starting to come together for me. I’m getting ideas again, uh oh.

But how did this get me to blogging? Well it turns out that many of these RSS feeds and indeed many podcasts are extensions of blogs. And in researching the folks who were providing the rss content and podcasts, I invariably landed in their blogs. I started getting into their conversations, then following the comments to their source which led me to other blogs, gaining more understanding of the blogging culture in general and soon I was deep into this dark unknown subculture of the digital world.
So it finally caught up with me, I could no longer ignore blogging. Well by now you can see the pattern, and off on another knowledge bender I go, this time its all about the blog. I’m actually still very new to it all, I’ve found SlashDot.com which is one of those must reads for all who even think for a minute they know what’s up on the web. Well I’m not sure any official organization has bestowed a title of interweb greatness upon them, but I’m sure in the legal world they would certainly be referred to as “precedent”. My first day reading slashdot, someone posted some info about Peter Jackson doing video blogging during the filming of King Kong. Very cool, I would have never known about it, I am enlightened. See how easy that is? Well eventually my wife would have found it, she usually beats me to that kind of stuff. But not this time!

So now I’ve got the itch to blog myself which leads me to the logical starting point for a newbie blogger, here, blogger.com.