A few years ago, I had a blog. It was one of those emo blogs: honest, confessional, and far too personal. Of course, I learned the same lessons many other young bloggers learn: people read blogs. When personal relationships are the top priority in your life, or at least the only thing worth writing about, intensely personal blogs inevitably lead to trouble. My old blog was not without its rewarding moments: it was worth all the time I spent when I saw a quote from it scrolling across the screensaver of a friend I didn’t know even read it. But it was no coincidence that I stopped blogging shortly after I started dating Faith; it was an outlet for bottled emotions that was no longer necessary. Incidently, it still exists, but I think it’s tough to find unless you know where to look.

This new blog, Ragesoss 2.0, will be an adult blog. Nothing too personal, nothing too offensive, nothing I wouldn’t want to broadcast over the internet.

I’m going to see how long it takes people to stumble upon it.

Speaking of “Stumble Upon,” I’ve been exploring Firefox browser extensions lately and I installed StumbleUpon! a few days ago. StumbleUpon! is a service that sends you to random, highly reviewed websites (based on your interests), so you can find some of the really neat stuff on the web that you never knew existed. After hours of very enjoyable surfing, I came across an SEO (search engine optimization) website, which led to a site that tracks the Zeitgeist of Google searches, which led to the Google blog, which led to Blogger. I had been thinking for a while about starting a blog, and that surf trail reminded me how much I like Google and its philosophy. In particular, I read some articles about how Google reorganized its ranking algorithms in 2003 (the so-called Florida Update–named hurricane style–created mass confusion among professional website optimizers by circumventing some of the standard tricks for achieving the coveted top spots in search results). One writer suggested that Google has encouraged and significantly shaped the massive turn toward blogging in the last several years, and now blogs are extremely important determinates of search rank calculations: an actual victory for the little guy, sticking it to The Man and his army of internet mercenaries who populate the virtual world with useless websites whose sole purpose is banner clicks.

So here I am, with a Blogger blog, doing my part to make the information of the world more useful and user-friendly.