my first blog post. ever.

There we go. My first blog. Well, not really. I made a half-hearted effort at it last year. Wrote a couple of posts, which I may or may not add here. But it didn’t amount to anything, especially since I stubbornly refused to give WordPress a go, thinking I could easily code the damn thing myself (which is all wrong).

I recently bought a copy of TIME Magazine, where they proudly presented “you” as Person of the Year for 2006. And after reading it, I realised something. Even though I visit web sites like Digg, YouTube, WordPress and Flickr on a daily basis, not to mention my god-like devotion to Wikipedia(I do my best to stay away from MySpace), I was not person of the year, no matter what TIME said.

I wasn’t person of the year because I didn’t contribute to these sites. It took me ages to register an account on Digg so I could digg/bury stories (which I still rarely do) or digg/bury comments (hence the account). I also registered an account on YouTube, but only so I could see videos flagged as inappropriate by the user community, which required an account to view. And MySpace? Don’t even talk to me about MySpace. Think I had a MySpace account for less than 48 hours before I found out it was horrible and had it deleted. I honestly prefer to keep in touch with my friends by other means, even if that doesn’t always work.

I suppose the biggest reason why I didn’t do these things because I never like to join the bandwagon. I heard about many of these sites when they were virtually in their infancy, when they were sensations within the then smaller internet community, and not the international superdupermega websites which they are today, attracting the interest of corporations like News Corp. and Google. I started going “wow, this is neat” and “maybe I should give it a try,” especially with Wikipedia. But, since I’m a lazy, procrastinating bastard, it never amounted to anything (apart from a couple of Wiki articles and pictures), and by the time I actually got around to it, it seemed like everybody was doing it. And everybody was talking about it. It was the new Yoga. Well, the bandwagon effect was sweeping the world, and even the US Marines have their own MySpace account now. And I didn’t really want to stick my head in there at that point, just like everybody else.

I also plan to upload some of my pictures to this blog, and who knows what else. In the meantime, visit my other WordPress project, the website for the Model UN Society at my university, of which I am a member.