Why blog? why now??

If a blog post is published and no one is around to read it, does it make a difference?…

That’s the thought that kept me from opening a blog all these blogosphere years. Bloggers write for others to read, but in an information overload time when I can hardly read just the few feeds I need for work, I’d have a very hard time keeping up with reading all the stuff friends write. So why bother?

But then I started working in Delver, and one day it dawned on me. I was waiting for my turn to speak at IAAI-08, and listening to some very interesting talks had this tingling of “…I could blog about my thoughts on that!“, when I suddenly realized that this is what will change with real social search. Suppose I indeed blogged about insights from IAAI on the creative uses of Wikipedia as NLP datasets generator, the chances of that being helpful to a friend or colleague, at that moment, could be slim, and a post or two later – that post fades into oblivion. However, if that friend could find this socially-relevant post on-demand, just when needed – now that’s a different story. That’s pretty much what gmail did to email categorizing – but that’s a subject for a post on its own.

So what is this blog about? depends which of my alter egoz takes over, but it’s safe to say web search is always there, one way or the other. There, that’s general enough so I won’t need to re-edit this post as my blog evolves to discuss marine biology. Here goes!