Friday, December 17, 2010

The genesis of yet another blog in cyberspace

I've finally created a blog. A brief intro about myself: I'm a 25 years old scientific programmer at the Delft University of Technology. I'm interested in Peer-to-Peer (P2P), Programming Languages, and I'm currently developing interests in (Multimedia) Information Retrieval ((M)IR).

So why did I start a blog? Well, I will not discuss that in this first blog post. If you are looking for compelling reasons yourselves, I'd recommend watching "Hanselminutes on 9 - Social Networking for Developers - Part 1 - Every Developer Needs a Blog".

Instead, I will discuss why I've started this blog now. For long I have been toying with the idea of starting a blog, but I've never had any concrete ideas for the actual blog posts. What good is a blog if it does not have any posts on it?

So I put my blogging ambitions on ice.

With the advent of Twitter, my frozen ambitions started to thaw, albeit slowly. I first had to look past Twitter's "Sitting in my chair now"-image before finding good uses for it. But when I found my raison de twitter, I started spreading links/news/etc. about the fields I'm interested in. Soon, people interested in my tweets followed me and I followed them back (if I deemed their tweets to be interesting). For sharing news and giving a short opinion on a recent event every now and then, 140 characters were enough.

However, microblogging obviously fails when you don't want to be micro. Some findings simply cannot be embedded in a tweet of 140 characters, although sometimes I got away by splitting the to-be-shared message in two tweets. Now I've come to the point where I can no longer cheat my way out. I simply needed more than just a small multiple of 140 characters for what I wanted to share (my next blog post).

So yeah, I've finally found something to write about which doesn't fit in a tweet. :)

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