Overcoming Inertia

It has been eight years since I last posted in a blog.

Back then, I was a young teenager who rode on the blogging hype and blogged about everything and anything under the sun. It was fun as I used to think that a blog is a brilliant avenue to pour out raw emotions and thoughts, no different from a diary - in fact, I thought that it was better than a diary as I could set a javascript password to protect my blog, sharing secrets only to my closest friends. This blogging habit lasted 2-3 years till I got to learn more about data security and privacy on the internet, and then realized that my simple javascript password protection can be easily bypassed and allows my blog to be accessible by the general public. Since Blogger did not have a user friendly functionality of setting a blog private then, I stopped blogging for good.

Even though good blogs do tempt me to contribute my own content at times, I never had a strong enough circumstance that push me back to this digital media world. I always used the lack of content inspiration or my limited command of the English Language as an excuse to remain hidden in the shadows. Eventually, this inertia became subconsciously too huge for me to overcome.

Now then, WHY have I created a blog and start blogging once again?

Yes, being able to submit something for my Digital Media Benchmarking Assignment could be a contributing factor, but knowing myself, it is insufficient a reason to get me cracking. Fundamentally, I will only put in effort in doing something which I believe there is value, and no, grades have never been large enough a motivation for me.

So what value have I seen?

I have seen the power of personal branding, wow-ed at discoveries like the law of emergence, gotten really amazed by the power of weak ties through a case study on Twittamentary (I even developed a prototype web application here that could be a platform for everyone to do projects in a decentralized manner), seen new perspectives to corporate communications via Bob's speech... -- all these happened within 4 weeks ever since I took a module with Prof Michael Netzley.

Finally, I have broken the ice with this blog post. Being overwhelmed by 'new' tools like RSS that feeds me 1000+ news daily, never ending tweets at twitter, and blog posts by my peers with near perfect writing styles will not hinder me any longer. This marks the beginning of my exploration of the digital media, and I eventually hope to be able to figure out the best type of content I can gather, sieve, and share with every one of you.

Let the journey begin!