I've volunteered myself to attempting to write weekly on various topics in current events over at the Progressive Blogger Union. I've finished my first entry, but it won't be posted until tomorrow morning, to stay in sync with their schedule.

I'm not really sure that this sort of thing actually has any great value from the perspective of trying to push good analysis to the forefront; my experience has been that inviting a lot of people at random to talk or write about something generates a little bit of useful information buried in chaff (and whether or not I'm going to be in the "chaff" category myself remains to be seen, though I intend to skip a week's entry rather than write something abysmally useless). On the other hand, I've found myself a little out of touch with current events from time to time, and this should force me to at least pay attention once in a while.

And, of course, there's the fact that I like to write. "Never argue with a man who buys ink by the barrel," the quote goes, though I've seen it attributed variously to Oscar Wilde, William Randolph Hearst, and a Chinese proverb. In the age of ubiquitous high speed Internet connections, that may be extended to "... or disk space by the gigabyte," and yet everyone continues to argue with one another, despite the fact that it's practically impossible to buy disks that carry less than dozens of gigabytes of data.

You have to do this sort of thing for the satisfaction of it, or out of the need to write, rather than the outcome. Participating in the blogging world is a bit like being one of a million monkeys on a million typewriters, hoping that someone will eventually be able to pull a lost work of Shakespeare out of the noise. We're the taggers of the new age, with the redeeming virtue that at least we bring our own walls to spray paint on.

I didn't really intend to spend a lot of time on news commentary when I put this new software together. Actually, I didn't even intend to write a lot at all. It was a technology experiment. Then, I found the lure of having a place to record my thoughts where friends could see them and know how I was doing to be too tempting. And then, I found that I have a hard time getting over my general fear of public abuse to write personal logs such as this one, so I write to the next things that come to my mind, usually either on politics or technology. Some of them end up published, some get dropped completely.

I'm starting to collaborate with Lynne now on writing fiction, something I hope will help ease the urge while remaining in more pleasant topics.