I’m not much for this blogging lark. It’s not that I don’t read any blogs or appreciate some of the minority of more informed, insightful, specialist screeds; it’s more that, well, the world already seems full enough of the decidedly non-specialist, positively inane sort without my adding any more to the weight of the world’s inanities. And whatever my ’specialism’ is, it’s probably not something I’d much like to blog about or others would enjoy reading. Which only leaves the trite and commonplace, and then there’s that overabundance I’ve already noted.
Yet here I am. And the reason for my somewhat reluctant conversion to the blog is suitably banal: a little tech tool. A toy. A device for adding ‘feature sets’ to something that once managed to function perfectly well without them. And one which, like all the best tech toys and tools, once grasped makes you wonder how you ever managed without its sheer, excessive unneccesariness before.
I got an iPhone.
In the week immediately following its purchase, I happened to compose a few emails for a work colleague recommending some apps I’d tried: mini-reviews, in effect. And I noticed that not many other reviews had told me exactly what I needed to know before trying out the apps myself. Better do it myself, I thought. I also snapped some sort of tiny wild creature on the iPhone camera outside of work, and emailed it to a colleague, which led to a debate about the vermin’s exact identity. I took a couple of poor snaps of a dusky sea near my home, and discovered that, although uploading them to Apple’s MobileMe service could be useful, I didn’t really want to set up a gallery or ten for every occasion: just deposit the pictures somewhere random. Oh, and I also started using RSS in anger again, and furiously clipped away on my iPhone at news articles that looked like they’d be worth a return visit or a recommendation.
So I had strewn stuff everywhere, disjointed and fractured, accessible by various tools, but entirely divorced one from the other. And then it struck me – the obvious often takes a while to, in my case – that the best place to deposit disconnected content that’s probably of no real interest to anyone but myself would be, of course, a blog.
So here it is: a dumping ground for thoughts, notes, pictures, articles, reviews, and just about anything else that I happen to feel like collecting, however briefly, in one ramshackle place. A barn, containing a rustic event, a dance of little grace or style. And a mongrel with an uncertain end and a tendency to yap all the while. An obscure corner containing incongruous things that just happen to have fallen together by chance, and which are remarked upon purely in passing.
In short, precisely the sort of banality I’d been trying to avoid creating. As the old saying goes, “If you can’t beat them, join them, or at least blog about not being able to beat them.”
Welcome to the badinage.
