I’ve been reading about BT’s hyperlink patent today. I actually tried reading the patent itself, but that’s a mouthful. Popular opinion seems to be that it’s a non-issue and it’ll just blow over. I agree with that. Not only is it indescribably silly, I just can’t see it holding up legally, or the patent being found to apply to HTML. But it seems not everyone is that optimistic. Well, not optimistic in that way, anyway. This article has quotes from some programmers that scares me more than anything about the patent itself.

But programmers said it wouldn’t be too difficult to come up with another way to propel people through Web pages. And it’s a job they’d happily take on, they said, because BT’s court case has infuriated them….

“If BT won the right to collect fees-per-click you’d have a ton of seriously pissed-off programmers, with all the financial resources of every big business in the U.S. who has anything to do with the Internet behind them, working on coming up with a new protocol,” open-source developer Mike Markan said.

So these Open Source guys want to give in to BT and throw out the entire idea of <a href="">? Am I reading that right? That seems worse than anything proposed in the legal case. Maybe I’m interpreting it wrong, but the knee-jerk Open Source reaction seems to be one of throwing out the basic linking structure of HTML itself for some “new protocol,” rather than fighting BT with everything they’ve got. The web is built on standard protocols. HTML and hyperlinking are the most basic of these. Fracturing of HTML on this scale is something that we might not recover from, especially if most everyone has to keep using the old, patented, ways for “backwards compatibility”. If BT wins, we might have a dark future, but hopefully not as dark as these guys are suggesting.

Who should we be more scared of?

Ah, so my blog has been getting out of date already. Fear #1 on my great blogging project is becoming self-fulfilled.

Oh well, I keep telling myself this is just for fun. Writing to my blog is never going to be a serious part of my life. Nobody’s ever going to stumble across it and secretly wish that I kept it updated more. Nobody cares, so I shouldn’t either. I’ve spent more time tweaking the HTML in the template than I have writing to it. I guess that’s just my nature.

Does the <blink> tag still work? I wonder…

Blog in progress

More later. How much later, I can’t say.

–Update…No blink in IE6. I guess I should be thankful.

All night tweaking templates, melding Blogger into my site’s (semi-)design.

Time to shut down.

I guess I do need to divulge that it was Chris Taylor’s Time magazine article that is responsible for my experimentations here. But no, I’m not some wide-eyed newbie that read an article in a magazine and decided to give this Internet thing a try. Chris’ article was kind of just the nudge that pushed me over the edge. Blogging really seems to be coming out of the shadows, first with Geoff Nunberg’s piece on NPR’s Fresh Air, then John C. Dvorak’s article last week, and now the article in Time. I had been thinking about blogging…but what to use? Dave Winer’s Radio 8 just came out, and that’s one choice. Blogger was one of the first to make a big splash, and I always hear about Greymatter and Moveable Type, and I have plenty of experience with ASP/Database programming, so I could have just built my own. It was never a priority, though, since I figured I’d get it up and have nothing to write about.

Then came Chris’ article, and it go me thinking again. And I realized that I had heard so much about all these tools, but I had never actually used one of them. The article made Blogger sound pretty easy, and it didn’t mean actually setting much up myself. So, here I am. The new resident of BloggerLand. Now, to overcome the 24/7 writer’s block that I call my life.

Well, I’m actually trying it. For quite a while now I’ve been watching the whirlpool of “blogging” from the sidelines, wondering if I’d ever get any good stuff in my head to post myself. Now, I’m not about to admit that I’m turning into a writer yet. But, I have gotten severely curious with everybody talking about Blogger, so here I am, trying to figure out just how the whole process goes.
Am I expecting anyone to really read this? No. I’ve been reading blogs long enough to know that you’ve got to post like every day to get any serious attention. It’s like brushing your teeth; go write in your blog after every meal. Beside, I read the heavyweights, like Doc, Dave Winer, Zeldman. Who am I to compete with them? They’re writers. They write for the fun of it, not because it’s their job, not because it’s on a computer or about computers, but just because they’re writers and that’s what writers do. Well, that’s not me. I used to think I was a writer, when I was younger, but then I got old enough to actually read some of my own stuff, and I realized I was getting worse, not better. So, this little page isn’t going to make any big waves.

But, I’ve had this website for half a year, and it’s time I do something with it. Besides acting as a front-end for my piddling little non-business (total clients: 0). So, I get to see what Blogger’s all about, I get to maybe get a little inspiration and reason to write, and, most importantly, I get to run up and down the halls yelling “I have a blog!”

Woo-wee.