This blog is supposed to be about one man’s transition from desk and screen to field and forest, and you were probably hoping for some incompetent-bloke-with-a-chainsaw jeopardy by now. However, my back is still knackered, so I’ve had to reshuffle the plans and stay in the digital world a bit longer.
I enjoy writing this blog. It’s giving me some structure and really helping me figure things out as I go along. I’m also hoping it will help attract collaborators, and sow the seeds of the community I’m aiming to grow. But it’s only going to do that if people can find it.
If I ever get any readers, it’s likely that a good proportion of them will not have been born when blogs began. The term blog (from weblog) was coined in 1997, and in the early days it was mostly people doing what I am doing now – regularly recording and sharing the minutiae of their lives, for the benefit of themselves and their friends, without too much thought.
Then blogging became a profession, then an industry. Monetised. Every post on every blog had to be useful / helpful / insightful. Apparently, people didn’t want to know what was going on in your life; they wanted to know the top ten things they could do to lose weight, to get more money. Or to start their own lucrative blog.
Fast-forward to 2024, and now AI can do a pretty good job of generating useful, helpful and insightful blog posts. In seconds. For free.
The inevitable tsunami of ‘content’ could, ironically, mean a return to the roots of blogging. ChatGPT can rehash everything that’s gone before. But it can’t choose what to have for breakfast, strive towards a goal, or injure itself.
