Blogging ... again

It's been more than ten years since my last blog entry. I never had a blog of my own, but I contributed a few entries for other people's blogs in the early days.

In those early days, I figured blogging would never catch on. I saw that a number of the earliest bloggers were very self-centered and I thought that nobody would ever want to read what they wrote. I certainly didn't want to be like them.

I was wrong, in a number of ways, but I was also right about one thing. All blogging, by definition, is somewhat self-centered. We write about what we know. But there's a difference between self-centered and self-serving. The best bloggers write to share -- not to tout -- and self-aggrandizing blogs usually don't survive. In general, blog readers don't want to spend their time reading about how great other people are.

Another reason that I didn't blog is that I was working on a couple of books, including one that I had tentatively called The Natural Interface, about user interfaces. But writing a book takes a lot of time. I've collected notes for years and haven't yet written the book. With a blog, I can just write one thing at a time. And I might as well share what I've written.

And that's my goal in blogging -- to share. I'll share things that I know and things that I don't know. I'll share things that I just learned and maybe things I wished I'd learned. I'll share things I'm thinking about and perhaps things I'd rather not think about. I hope you'll join me, I hope you'll find it interesting, and I hope you'll share back.

When I jump into things, I really jump in. So, I'm starting not one, but three, blogs. It seems readers are happier if a blog focuses on a single major topic, so I decided to separate the different things I wanted to write about into separate blogs. Most likely, not all of my readers will want to read all three blogs.

thisUser	is a blog about user interfaces and human interaction	(feed)
thisDev	is a blog about software design, development, and architecture	(feed)
thisTangent	is a blog about anything else I want to write about, including (at least) puzzles, art, photography, ambigrams, cooking, and even politics.	(feed)

If you like all three blogs, you can subscribe to thisMix, which mixes the three blogs into one feed.

Update: Removed the summary feed (everybody subscribed to the full mix).