…Of All The Things I’ve Missed

How time flies. As we hurtle toward the end of another year, I feel increasingly annoyed that I no longer have time to do all the things I want to do. One of those things is blogging. I go through periods of doing it, then I get bored for a while, and then, eventually, things get left behind and forgotten.

For the last few years, I’ve been blogging about free software and free culture, and in a few weeks, that blog will be turning up as a book. Rob Myers and I are now trying to compile the best parts of our collective works together into a single volume that we hope will inspire people to explore free software for themselves, and encourage artists to think about different ways to interact with their audience. But, for the most part, I am tired of simply blogging about free software.

That’s not to say I’m bored of free software — far from it, but when I began working on Exploring Freedom, my day-to-day activities with free software were far more limited than they are now. Now, I write about and work on further the cause of free software all day. I am very luckily to be in a position where this is the case, and one of the things I want to do in the next twelve months is to increase the amount of writing and public speaking I do.

So, what of this blog then? What is the idea of a journal of the electronic internets?

Well, I was struggling to come up with a username that wasn’t taken, and having settled on the somewhat dorky, m4ttl (as my vacant namesake is apparently somewhat active), I figured the name that might inspire me to do the thing I’ve really been wanting to do for some time, as well as serve a not-too-shabby title for the project itself.

So, this is my intention — to collate and put together a short, printed publication once a month, and mail it to people. The printed publication will be based on things I talk about here, but it’ll have that awesome, tangible thing that only a printed thing can give you.

What first inspired me to even consider this, was reading lots of back issues of 2600, plus all the fun I’ve had putting the book together.

Also, I really like the idea of having an ISSN number.