It's hard to believe that it has been 10 YEARS since I started this blog. Today I have been surfing the archives, all 2,249 posts since November 2005 (A humbling experience indeed. We all start somewhere, right?) and pondering just how much evolution there has been with the way we interact online, share news, and how we cyber-network. Ten years ago I sat in a meeting at an agency where I was an intern and the lead web guru there introduced us to how Blogspot worked and explained why it was so revolutionary. I immediately went home and created my own and have consistently updated with new posts practically every day since. It's interesting to ponder that in 2005, for the vast majority of folks, the places to hang-out online were niche message boards, and of course MySpace and Facebook. There was no Instagram or Twitter, no Tumblr or Pinterest, it was the time of keeping countless browser bookmarks for blogs and web magazines we enjoyed. I remember visiting dozens of these sites, one at a time, with my morning coffee. Soon the idea of RSS seemed promising and I organized a Feed Reader to collect and peruse web content from one central hub, but that concept didn't really gain widespread popularity. (Proof of this is that despite the 1.5M page views of this blog there are currently only 81 followers.) What did work well was to stay active with blog posts and manually syndicate them to other social networks (Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter). I have always used this blog as the primary source, the center, the full version of my stories, in chronological order, allowing all reposting to stem off from here. (This seems like a good idea to me for a few different reasons, especially the fact that the audience in cyberspace is in a seemingly perpetual migration. Who knows what the hotspot will be in 2020? I hope we are not wearing 24/7 GoPro cams and having snappy chats.) Back in 2008 I began to travel often and take hundreds of iPhone photos ( 2014 / 2013 / 2012 / 2011 / 2010 / 2009 ) so I started to organize batches of pics from each trip and share them here. A tradition I have kept alive, and will continue to, parallel to my updates on other platforms. In retrospect, the most profound reflection I am having today is the realization that This Blog has in many ways become an open diary, a place to document my discoveries and growth in realtime, a platform from which I am able to share my art and design endeavors with a much larger audience than could ever physically visit a gallery exhibition or a city wall mural. It has become a motivator to work harder, continue growing, remember where I've been, and stay active.
