What do I have to contribute?

It has struck me over the last couple of days and it’s a reflection of my attitude to being interested in geeky things in general. I’m an elitist. When I started my blog back in 2003, I loved the fact that relatively few of them existed. It was a reflection of my day to day life and I felt my voice was being heard (even though I had no analytics tools to back that up and it was not particularly interesting).

Back then, I started out on Movable Type and quickly moved it over to b2/cafelog, which later grew into WordPress. Fast forward 5 years to now and every manner of blog subject exists, whilst in the meantime my own seems to have fallen into a state of disrepair.

I think my blogs’ own slowdown has occurred because blogging about day to day life is not so much fun now – I’m no longer unique as I was in terms of the technical ability of being able to output my thoughts. Anyone can start a blog, tumblelog, lifestream or twitter account and use it to expose their daily activity online. They need to know nothing, or very little at all about how the back end works. So I’m now left thinking, what do I have to contribute in all this?

My own PhD research has had little exposure here, where if I had chosen to air my thoughts, it might be continuing in new directions from discussion which may have opened up around it. Instead, it is hidden away in research papers and closed forums which an average joe may never come across.

I’m proposing that I push to air my thoughts on all manner of subject here over the coming year, as well as my usual day-to-day activity. Hopefully I’ll be contributing something new, something interesting, something playing on my mind and which I want to discuss with each post.

I’d love it if you’d join me for the ride and I promise I won’t be at all elitist.