The posts below are not particularly forthcoming in respect of myself, what I'm doing here, why and where to from here.

The quotes below, while all very interesting, don't really have much flavour of me, but I regard that being chosen by me, in the long term will tell you a lot about my taste, and thus eventually, about me.

But then again, how much of me do I want to reveal to whomsoever shall find this one of (at this time) some two million blogs in the world?

I'm a shy guy. Modesty is really just an inverse vanity and so for that reason I'm going, more or less, to abandon it. Modesty says you are important, but the light will stay firmly under the bushel. Pfaugh!

So lets start with the basics.

So OneSquared have located a suitable back-end system which is available for resale. I was told the details, but presently they are not important. The important thing is, they, 1² didn't decide they had to do the whole bizzo themselves, nor did the creators of the back-end system. They decided to concentrate on a particular layer of the system, publish interfaces and let a thousand (hopefully) retailers take the wholesale product to the vastly diverse market. This is not unique, but in on-line systems I think it will become the norm.

Prepare for a phrase that I also "stole" (depending on your degree of "IP" absoluteism) from David Weinberger's "Small Pieces, Loosely Joined. That's it, "Small Pieces, Loosely Joined."

In the old days you did it all, today you don't. Wholesale/retail splits aren't new at all, but the number of layers that I can see occuring, is going to increase. After all, there are a lot of blog hosters, content management systems and goodness knows what next that will all be bound together with the magic of RSS.

Sooooo, the nice people at 1² who come to ThursdayNightCurry.com thought that I might have some useful comments to make about their choice and offered me a free trial, hopefully to be followed by a free service. That's my disclosure I guess. But I think the reason they chose me for this role is that they believe I wouldn't be swayed by that free offer and would remain honest in my comments about it.

So far its very good and has all the things I like and a whole lot stuff I don't understand, but then again I don't need to.

Remember we want choices, but we don't want to have to make them. For those of you who see Wellington's Dominion Post newspaper there was an article today about how too many choices make people unhappy. You should see though, how unhappy they get when they don't have any choice.

So hopefully that covers off why I'm here.

I've been involved with blogs, mostly on the consumption side for a while, not as long as Dave Winer, but then one of Dave's many claims to fame is that he is the first blogger. Maybe. Depends on the definition and as I don't believe there is one... hey.

My first exposure to blogs was a perverted (aka "hacked") guestbook script, it was in reverse chronogical order, people posted (without logging in, Holy Wiki Batman) messages and URLs and to all intents and purposes it was one.

It was pretty chaotic, and more so than many enjoyed and it eventually fell down to just one poster.

This blog however will endeavour to remain coherent, or let me just promise I won't post here in a euphoric state, beyond the normal happiness and glee that sometime attends the discovery of some really good thinking (aka that which I agree with), good writing or good ideas.

I'm intending to intersperse it with small triumphs from my own struggle with existence and observations and the occasional bricolage.

'cos myself, thats what I think I do best. A piece from here, a piece from there, aligned with a trend, something I read and suddenly I'm making up all these assertions. I'm pleased to say that I agree with a lot of people who have immense reputations and in a number of cases they have made kind comments about my contributions and even replied to email.

I carry a small concern that this will look like name-dropping. So what. The "blogroll" lists the usual suspects who will remain there as long as they still make sense, for far beyond the low switching cost of free-to-air TV, radio or other broadcast medium, blogs are ephemeral and abundant.

Hmm, that was more than I meant to write, but sometimes the old fingers just get into it and when they are on a roll (as opposed to the times I can hardly type my own name) its probably best to get as much out as possible.

So expect, postings that are just highlight excerpts from great essays elsewhere, interspersed with commentary from me on other blogs and the odd personal observation.

Don't however expect to find me in here. I'd be very suprised if the opinion you form of me falls close to what you might if we met in person. In a previous life I was a radio announcer (which gives me a certain resonance with Doc Searls) and I'll never forget the disappointment I turned out to be to one listener by being much shorter and much less blue eyed than she had expected.

I hope to do some book and movie reviews, for apart from my Quixotic addict-level attempt to read the entire Internet, I enjoy movies and, since I discovered the Library, books, thus the us.imdb.com and amazon.com are also favourites.