ASCII by Jason Scott

Jason Scott's Weblog

README.TXT —

Hello, and, in some cases, welcome back.

This is the official beginning of my own dedicated weblog, covering everything from essays I write about subjects I need to work out, to information about advances across my historical websites, to the occasional BBS Documentary gossip and discussion. While a number of locations have existed for this information before, I finally decided that I might as well try this out for the time being, and see if the interface is compatible with my writing and working style.

I should state for the record that Weblogs, and their counterparts in livejournals, deadjournals, bloggers, userland and what-have-you slipped quite happily under my radar; My attention was focused elsewhere, and the nature of the whole process seemed somewhat un-new to me. When describing them to people, I tended to call them “BBSes where the only message topic is the Sysop”. This is generally true for a mass of them, but not all.

I found that a lot of weblogs lack, in any meaningful fashion, content; they are simply an additional layer of gatekeeper, pulling data from various sources which you have equivalent access to, and then adding a short pithy comment and pasted paragraph before sending you on your way. It didn’t seem worth it to have to slog through a couple dozen of the things every single day in the hope that they would reveal some interesting nugget of linkage I might have stumbled into my own way. And I certainly didn’t want to be yet another voice shouting over the cacaphony.

Things have achieved a better sort of clarity now that I understand RSS and News Aggregators and so on; then the whole paradigm shifts and we have a number of folks providing content channels that my little feedreader program can slog through and pick out the newest entries. Essentially, websites become Usenet again, but the mid 1980s Usenet, which was quite the little intellectual parlor for a while.

My intention with this weblog, then, is to add content; to create information, to add my thoughts and embryonic ideas into a discernable web-based location, allowing syndication and feedback. I am not interested in starting a community at the moment so I will not add comment links to the essays. I welcome e-mail, of course, and will do my best to respond intelligently to them and bring particularly helpful/insightful missives to the log itself.

Expect extremely spotty posting, as little as once every two or three months, but who knows, maybe I’ll surprise everyone and become a daily poster.

Weblogs, more than most writing mediums, reflect the flaws and advantages of their owners; I hope you enjoy the latter and live with the former. And thank you for browsing.


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