Bas Schouten

So, it seems it's finally happened, I've decided to start a blog. Interestingly enough I've never really taken a lot of interest in things like blogging, microblogging, social networking or any other one of those popular internet activities. I don't have a facebook account, I've probably seen the twitter website about 3 or 4 times in my entire life. To be honest, if a year or so ago anyone would have asked me what the 10 things were I'd be least likely to do, starting a blog would probably rank somewhere high up in that list. So the question is, what brought about that amazing turnaround.

Well, interestingly enough, people who know me personally know I have strong opinions on nearly everything conceivable. From politics to social interaction, I'm always up for a good discussion, and usually I'll be quite convinced I'm right as well. So, in theory that would mean I'd be quite inclined to start a blog, after all, no better way to vent your opinion to a large group of people! The problem is, opinions change, and the internet has a tremendous memory, I'm really not so sure I want the world to remember my current opinions and thoughts 20 years from now.

This brings me to one of the reasons I'm not into a lot of these social internet activities. Normal social interaction, odd behavior, stupid actios, etcetera, exists in one point in time. You can get completely wasted and behave like a total idiot, but unless you do something stupid enough to hit the newspapers, the only record of this will be in the minds of people. You can then later say things like 'it wasn't that bad' or 'that's not how it happened', and noone would ever be able to fundamentally prove what you really did. The internet is a completely different world! Pretty much anything you do, no matter how silly, impulsive or stupid will be recorded and distributed to countless data storage devices. Yes, you better be real careful with what you do out there!

The second reason is much more simple. I'm not actually that interested in what other people do in their social lives, that is not to say I don't care about other people, but if they want to share their social life and possibly hear my opinion I'm sure they'll tell me about what they did last week face-to-face. One of the few twitter messages I ever read was from a friend and contained the following information: 'drinking a good glass of red wine while cooking'. Although ofcourse that information is very interesting, considering the limited amount of time one has in life, there really is more interesting information out there.

Finally I don't think people are that interested in what I do. My life isn't, and has never been that interesting, I do a lot of fun things, but I don't see how anyone else would benefit by reading about them.

So, the question asked remains, why a blog then? Well, the first point stands, but I suppose I'll just have to make sure I don't post too radical thoughts, and try not to post anything too stupid. Althought this is a hard task for me I think I'll manage that. As to the second point, I've noticed that although I'm still not interested in specifically what wine someone is drinking, or the tricks they can make their dog do, there's actually a fair deal of people posting much more informative and interesting things on their blogs. Making it actually an interesting way to keep up to date with the latest technical innovations people are working on.

This brings us to the last point, and with that the reason I myself decided to start this blog. I recently started working as a contractor for the Mozilla Corporation. Very quickly after I started I got asked 'Let me know if you do a blog post, I'd love to see some screenshots...' And I concluded that I was doing things people would like to read about, evaluate and give useful feedback on.

And there's the reason, I hope that this way I can publish about technical innovations that I'm working on. Hopefully that way I can make use of the collective knowledge of people reading about my work and get feedback where I could improve on the things I'm doing or what alternative directions should be explored. Why this long rant then about why I'm starting a blog? Well, I guess I just wanted to justify things as not to look a fool to all those people I've always told I'd NEVER start a blog. :)