Going into the first full day of my return to blog­ging and, to be hon­est, it feels a lit­tle weird. I haven’t really had an out­let for my so-called cre­ativ­ity in the last few years out­side of my 9–5 and my soon to be defunct side ven­ture at (the ines­timable) Sur­fa­cade, Inc. The level of con­trol, of free­dom I have here is, to say the least, daunting.

But I think the real issue here is that when I first started in the late 90s, there was no “blo­gos­phere” but there were sev­eral tight-knit com­mu­ni­ties of cre­atives and techies (for the most part) strewn across the globe and plugged into only a hand­ful of sites. And so while we all had voices, it felt as though we were only lis­ten­ing to each other. It was almost as if we were work­shop­ping amongst our­selves in a room with glass walls — but that room was some­where in Siberia.

That’s no longer the case. My lawyer is online (and very, very real). My (step)son is online. My mother sent me a MySpace mes­sage (through a friend of hers, but that’s nei­ther here nor there). If they ever decide to Google me, they’ll undoubt­edly reach this site. So — and I mean all jokes and delu­sions aside — what does that mean for me? What sort of effect will the things I say here have on my rela­tion­ships with my fam­ily and friends? What sort of effect should it have? Should I hold back? Am I made up of the sort of stuff that could be labeled as offen­sive? Or weird? Or stu­pid? Was I ever, really? No clue. We’ll find out soon enough.

In the mean­time, hello again to some of my old friends: Antoine Hes­ter, Jason Walker, Sarah Huny Young, Stephen Higgens. Hello to some of my new friends: Eric Car­roll, Liz Burr, John C. Bland, II.