At various times I've had grand ideas and even grander plans but, almost always, succumbed to the spectre of taking this all far too seriously.
Jay posted a number of links that had me disappearing down rabbit holes, crawling through people's sites, because it was interesting and fun.
Manu mentioned the Marginalia search engine and its similar website finder which, again, had me all Alice in Wonderland.
I looped back to feedle and lost myself in the results of a couple of searches.
It wasn't just reading people's thoughts but also checking out how their sites were made and the rationale for those choices. It was the obvious passion they demonstrated, the belief in the decisions they made. Everything coalesced into this amazing warmth for the small web, the 'personal' web; the internet as it should be.
It made me realise that I can easily get away from the most important aspect of all this: the fun! It's been incredible fun over the past five years to build things (first on top of WordPress and then the custom CMS) but that same sense of fun abandons me when it comes to using what I've built.
Poorchop exclaims that something feels wrong about the weblog format, describing "an inherent narcissism in thinking that anyone should care enough to read one's fleeting thoughts" but, often, that is exactly what we need.
Blogs allow their authors to explore thoughts and ideas in more meaningful and, perhaps more importantly, more permanent ways. The reader can gain a greater insight into, and connection with, the author than from messages on a social network.
The web itself is a social tool, after all, and fun is what helps to grease the cogs. I shouldn't allow myself to lose sight of that.
