Uncloaking now

In my first post on this blog ever, over three years ago, I said the point of doing this in the first place was to practice my writing and aggregate what George Carlin called brain droppings.

In that mindstate of November 2005, I also called the mere ownership of a blog presumptuous, and bluntly, a form of masturbation. The image I culled to mind then, as now, was of a jazz musician playing with his back to the audience, so swathed in his own brilliant improvisation that the only fair review would call the performance an act of musical masturbation.

But I digress. In 2005 I was not as wise to the direction the Web 2.0 winds were taking us. Sharing one's thoughts in a blog is really a way to connect ideas with those of other people, and forge links through cyberspace. Those links are the most important thing. They drive eyeballs to your web site and your ideas and observations, and more importantly weave an invisible yet omnipotent fabric throughout the millions of computers folded into the Internet.

If you think of any news story, any fact in that story, as a node or pinpoint, than each node can be connected to many others through details in the story. A followup story contains more nodes, referenced to the first ones, and so on, in a gigantic network. Linking data over time is one of the most basic things we can do as journalists. Heck, this is how historians make a living too. Google makes a shiny penny indexing content (nodes) throughout the Internet, and connecting the most relevant nodes to your search results page. It has algorithms that determine the importance of a given node by the number of connections it has and the importance of the connected nodes.

Now, after I hit the "PUBLISH POST" button on this blog entry, I will make this blog visible to Google and other search engines for the first time. Before, I didn't really care if anyone saw these words, so the blog was invisible online. You could find it if you typed in the URL, which I gave to friends, but that's about it. Now, as an experiment to myself, I'll see what happens as I take this thing public. To make this a true blog rather than an online repository of notes from my head.

Quite possibly nothing will happen. But maybe it'll spur me to blog more often, and add widgets to pimp this page out, and take a stab at some HTML and javascript snippets, and see where the brave new world of Internet publishing takes me.