(Warning: I'm writing this post while recovering from a splitting headache-- which is probably the result of caffeine withdrawal and a "Battlestar Galactica" marathon-- so don't be surprised if it rambles and sounds incoherent.)
Back in 1999, a young student by the name of Peter showed me the power and simplicity of blogging. I wish I could say I was smart enough to see how amazing this was and would turn out to be-- but the truth of the matter was it seemed like an awful lot of jiggery-pokery with Perl scripting just to update a simple web page. A year later, when I finally "got it", I had a blog through Blogger with my own domain name (thanks to the "Brand 50" book from Tom "CAPS LOCK" Peters). After Blogger got popular/overloaded, I made the jump to Greymatter-- it was a good platform (also written in Perl, I should note), but failed to keep up with trends in the field. Extinction is what happens when you ignore critical functionality, like RSS feeds, in favor of superficial qualities, such as "what song am I currently listening to?"
From there, I moved on to Blosxom. Blosxom is an amazing tool, in my opinion. So lean, so capable-- but it's horrible for someone who LOVES to tinker when they really need to focus on writing. Plus, Rael Dornfest's moved on to bigger and better things, so I suspect the golden days of Blosxom are over. That left me with either WordPress or Blogger as my blogging platform, so I wound up "closing the circle" as it were by returning to Blogger.
The thing is-- I'm slowly coming to the realization that the act of blogging alone is now no longer enough. Expressing myself in a vacuum, although better than suffocating, is not the same as finding people who are like-minded-- it's not the same as finding people who can help me "become actualized" (or whom I can help become "actualized"), or even transforming the world.
I need to make the jump to the next logical avenue-- social networking. Christ knows there's about 15 million of them to choose from. Google has Orkut, of course, but considering I don't actually live in Brazil, that's not doing me much good. MySpace appears to be very young women and much older men, which feels borderline creepy and uncomfortable-- so what's left for me? Facebook? Something else I haven't even heard about? I don't know-- but I'm looking.