It shouldn't be this hard

For the past week I've been wrestling with the Blogger interface. It is not intuitive at all. I know I've made things worse by being impetuous and trying to recreate things that didn't need to be recreated, but every time I come to a screen where I expect to be able to do something, I end up not being able to do that thing. I think somebody in charge needs to actually walk through a user’s experience of the site and take note of the frequent logical snarls you're likely to run into.

I've been thinking a lot about what I would write about. Most of my experience with blogs -- the really personal once I've read -- have either been about politics or technology. (mostly politics, though.) They daily news spew provides enough grist for the proverbial mill, I guess, and it's easy (well, it seems easy to those who are good at it) to be linked into a self-reinforcing network which will pick up ideas and themes in commentary and carry them forward. It's an impressive ecosystem, which I've observed closely on the left, and which I'm sure is paralleled on the right. The fortunate thing is that it's been an opportunity to tap into the vanguard of progressive thinking in a structured and rational way, and feel like your not missing anything, because the network you're tapping into is so large and has such disparate focus, that very little if anything can slip through.
I want to use this blog to re-find my voice. The strident voice that was shouting on the Well, lo those many years ago, about the intersection of politics and technology. There are so many levels at which this operates. Part of my praxis deals with the definition of work, and how the multi-mediation and cellularization of work affects politics. I still don't know too many people who are addressing this. If I look at the state of politics right now, I think we're still in a weird, interstitial state. I think that politics has regressed -- it's still fighting the agrarian versus industrial war. Hmmm, that's interesting, I hadn't thought of that before -- this Red State - Blue State tension is an eerie echo of the Civil War. Now I'm not an historian or sociologist, and I'm sure not the first person with such a facile analysis, but I don't think the nation has even gotten this notion that we've evolved through the knowledge economy into what I call "the design service economy". There's a lot to explore there. It's a platform, I'm happy.