Over the weekend my blog host, Scot Hacker at Bridhouse, converted this blog from Moveable Type to Word Press. Things are still in a mess. It’s like moving when the stuff has arrived but none of the boxes have been unpacked. Eventually I’ll get it sorted out. Meanwhile, Word Press is easier to use and has the warm and fuzzy feeling of being open source. I had wanted to go to Word Press when I left Blogger about a year ago to move to a hosted blog site. But it didn’t work out then. Better late than never!

Speaking of chaos, if you looked at last week’s blog entries and wondered, “What?” let me explain. On Monday I wrote the first of four installments of a piece titled, “The Time I Bought Half-Interest in a Newspaper from a Man with Wooden Teeth.” Silly as it may sound it’s a true story. I wrote and posted it in part for the sheer pleasure of revisiting an episode from my youth. But there was — or at least I intended there to be – a method to my madness. Earlier in November, I posted a call to create “A Mini Media Community” — think of it as part farm cooperative, part trade association, part social networking site for independent media producers.

I’ve been thinking about the idea for a while and it’s time to share it and find out if there is any interest in such a notion. Once, when I was trying to push a variant of this idea as a for-profit scheme, a venture capitalist told me that he never did a deal unless he could understand the other person. “Get under their skin,” was how he put it.

Although I envision this Mini Media Community as an open source effort that only means more people have to get involved. Which means more questions about who else is involved and how the idea evolved, and etcetera. As for what the Wooden Teeth story says about me, well, I hope it says that I’m a guy who’s done foolish things, dusted himself off and done better.

Meanwhile, the story was a pleasure for me to write and since this blog is my labor of love, having fun is a motivating factor. Having laid out this tale in four parts it may also be possible to tighten it up and find a place to publish it as the single piece it was meant to be. For me that’s another advantage to this type of long-form blogging. It could be the test bed for a future story or essay for which I might actually get paid. (Speaking of getting money I saw on Paid Content that BBC will pay for some “unique” user-generated content.)

So I may do more of this long-form stuff. But not today. This is a place-holder blog and an explanation for the new look (this is a default “theme” so I’ll change it again as soon as I have time). In a sense the visual disruption mirrors the disquiet I feel nearly but not quite two years into blogging. My first rush of energy, which has carried the blog this far, was to learn more about new media — the terms, the technologies, the rules, the players. (Like the big shakeup reportedly brewing at Yahoo; I hope news isn’t a casualty.) 

I’m not saying I’ve mastered that, but there’s enough sameness in what I see to make that “survey” approach less interesting to me. I’m not sure precisely what my next blogging rationale could or should be. But I know that I love the act of writing more than anything else. So I expect I’ll do more of that. I hope you’ll stay tuned.