Rui CarmoIt's odd to go back nearly four years and rifle my weblog archives for old stories, way back when weblogs were a risqué thing that nobody understood. Those were the halcyon days when Blogspot, Blogger and Livejournal weren't around (or maybe one of them was, but it was largely irrelevant) and when everyone was writing their own weblog engine.
(Before that everyone was writing their own Wiki engine - remember, Wikis predate blogs, even if they've been "rediscovered" since - and now they're all writing GTD applications on Rails, but that's another story.)
Back in those days (when we were here), it was mostly about creative writing. Regular readers will know that I have a warped sense of humor, and when I wrote in Portuguese (or rather, in my odd, lilting, English-tainted semantic equivalent of Portuguese, since I've spent pretty much all of my adult life reading, thinking and writing in English), that humor had a keen edge that I sometimes would like to get back.
Fortunately, I switched directions and moved to tech-oriented (or tech-inspired) writing before the weblog mania took this dinky little country of ours by storm.
I took the time to click through one of the national rankings, and there isn't a real story-teller in the bunch - it all seems like random cut and paste of the same old recipes of bigotry, political stupidity and bad-mouthing, with a heavy dollop of "reality blogging" thrown in.
(There is so much you can read about socks, teenage angst, football or politics, and they all generally stink as writing material.)
But I guess that's to be expected - it's pretty much the same on the US blog scene as far as I can discern, and after all, I can't say I have time to follow anything beyond the blogs of the few people I know (personally or electronically).
I do follow a few amazing photo blogs (I should put up a list sometime), but it's odd that there isn't more truly creative writing out there. Or if there is, it's pretty well hidden.
Maybe I should take up that torch again sometime.