Simon 2.0

So this is probably the fourth or fifth time I have set up a personal blog over the years, and I don't think I have ever got to writing post number 3.  Hopefully this time will be different, after all it is a new year and (along with losing weight, doing more exercise and cutting down on the alcohol) contributing more to the internet is one of my resolutions.

Towards the end of last year I noticed that I had become very much a 'consumer' of the internet.  I spent more time online than ever thanks to all the various mobile devices, but it was all reading, watching or listening.  I realised I no longer frequented and posted on online forums, newsgroups were pretty much dead, I had managed to avoid having a Facebook account, my twitter updates were sparse to say the least and despite spending a large portion of my time reading Reddit and Hacker News I had made but a few comments to each.

In the early(ish) days of the internet, during the mid to late 1990s, I probably spent 2 or 3 hours a day online, and this was spent equally between surfing the web, posting on newsgroups and chatting on IRC or ICQ.  Around 2004 when the web started to get all 'social' I was too busy to really keep up and although I kept abreast of all the technologies and up and coming startups in this area, I kind of stopped submitting any content, ignored questions I could have answered and purposefully avoided signing up to the social networks.  In 2011, this is going to change.

I'm not sure why I even started the personal blogs previously, probably some kind of ego trip and when I realised nobody was reading the motivation was gone, the purpose of this blog however is a little different:  I am going to use it to get me back in to habit of writing content and contributing to the internet; a sort of way to improve my writing without having to worry about editing the content or embarrasing myself.  I now run my own company providing teleconference services and I want to easily and confidently be able to write relevant and timely content for the site blog, for industry websites and on forums such as linkedin, as well as give back some (hopefully) valuable content and comments to the social news websites I love so much such as Hacker News and Reddit.

So, we are on day 2 of 2011 and I have made some progress on at least one of the new years resolutions.