I’ve been blogging since mid-1999. This is quite early in the history of blogging so I’m quite proud of it. In fact, according to A Brief History of Blogging:
In 1999, according to a list compiled by Jesse James Garrett, there were 23 blogs on the internet.
I’m pretty sure I’m not in that list of 23 blogs. In fact, I’m quite sure that number depends on particular definitions that seperate blog from “regularly updated personal homepage”. Also, how would anybody know the number of blogs when this description wasn’t uniformly utilised and discovery of sites had only recently shifted to Google’s indexing, ranking, and search-based approach?
What I do know is that I had to write my own blogging system for my website. This was probably the last bit of software development I ever did – and it was pretty ugly behind the scenes – but I was quite proud of it too. It had two seperate types of “posts”, one was a traditional article, and the other was an “idea”.
The “idea” content was supposed to be the blog-like content. Except I didn’t want it to be just a reverse chronological list like typical blog sites. Myself and good friend Graham Rix had an idea that the posts would be interconnected in a multidimensional way that would create a structured body of content over time. Rather than focus on only the newest posts we wanted to use the platform help us understand how our ideas related to one another.
What’s this got to do with Karl Ove? Well, as I was reading Book 2 of Karl Ove’s increasingly incredible My Struggle saga, I realised that I’d really like to learn to enjoy writing itself again. My Manage Without Them Blog works better if it’s actually about my MWT Model – rather than this present form of rambling. But there is also another more subtle constraint I’ve placed on the MWT blog.
One of my explicit intensions when I started the Manage Without Them site and associated blog was to develop my thinking into a grand unified theory of organisations. Though I haven’t managed to do that, the attempts have been crucial to my personal and particularly professional development.
The attempts to make everything connect together have exercised parts of my brain that I can then use in my professional career. The feedback I get reflects that I have developed myself in the way that I intended – and yet again I am proud.
But finding connections, explicitly trying to tie things together, and seeking interconnection is a maddening impulse. When it comes to writing it’s a constraint. While constraints, as always, can help with creative endeavorers, this is only one of many types of constraints I might utilise.
If I want to enjoy writing, write more, and extend my ideas more freely, I think I’ll benefit from removing that constraint. While reading My Struggle I often go back and re-read to find the exact moment we went from, say, a visit to the coffee shop, to the moment when Karl Ove is considering how nihilism shifts from being art and existentialism in Dostoyevsky to being largely the scientific name for teenage angst in the modern world. Often when I look back in the text to find the transition it simply isn’t there.
The transition makes sense. The ideas and particularly the emotional context often connects the passages. But the need to explicitly connect them in the text is absent. This, and of course the skilled application of many other techniques I can’t even detect, creates an engaging form of writing that I’d like to explore.