Being public
When you start to blog, you have to make some decisions. At least I know I have to. Should I tell the whole wide world of Internet everything about my personal life? Should I start playing a pundit? Should I post links to every vaguely entertaining page I come across, with a one-line comment, or should I create more content myself? Should I play a smart-ass, or keep the tone more formal? Maybe for some people these decisions come more easily - I suppose often the decision to start a blog comes from a need that dictates the mode of writing, too. Maybe it's so for me too, I just had to first decide why, exactly, I wanted a blog.
I decided the blog has to fill some space that is not already covered by my current methods of communication - I want to write about ideas that are easier to express in writing than in face-to-face discussions and write about things that I feel need more permanence than a one-line expression of thought on IRC. Areas to cover will be mostly technical, stuff like free software and software development, relating to things I do day to day (well, otherwise it would be pretty pointless to call it a blog.) I could use news, but I don't much feel like participating in flame wars. And I don't read usenet that often these days, anyway.
And because I'm a non-native english speaker, I had to make the decision of language, too: my Finnish is far more fluent than my English, and that goes for most of my friends, too. On the other hand, the things that I intend to cover here would have a rather limited Finnish-speaking audience. So English it is. Maybe my writing will improve along the way, too.
The next thing to do is to actually blog about something besides blogging, I guess.
