Time to start another blog. There have been a few others. First, there was Critical Thinking on the Web, which started sometime in 2001, I think, though it might have been as early as 2000. I didn’t think of it as a blog; indeed the concept and term hadn’t really arisen at that time. It was more like a link directory, or a kind of portal, for critical thinking. Others however have classified it as a blog. It certainly has some elements in common with your classic blog. It has been modestly successful, consistently garnering hundreds, sometimes thousands of hits a day over about 5 years.
Then there was another blog, which was a classic blog in form (it was on Blogger) but it was purely private. It was my own web notebook for recording thoughts, links, information etc. related to argument mapping software development. It helped sustain my passion for the topic through the long struggle to establish Austhink Software. Scanning through the entries would remind me how many and various are the interesting ideas bearing upon the Rationale project. And it would remind me of how much we rapidly forget if we don’t record it somewhere where we can later scan it.
This blog will be both standard in form, and public. Like most blogs it will have a number of purposes but a key one is to help build community around certain topics which are at the heart of what I do for a living, both in the financial sense, and in the sense of a life or calling. And perhaps the discipline of maintaining it help deal with an addiction, one which takes up far too much of my spare time, especially in the evening after our daughter has gone to bed – viz., reading other people’s blogs.
