So what took you so long?

I may have the highest ratio of words-written-about-blogs to actual-blog-entries-published on record. In fact, until yesterday, the ratio was basically infinite. I'd written about the art of interesting linking in my first book, and prattled on endlessly about group weblogs in Emergence. More recently, I wrote a long piece for Salon about the role blogs can play in helping to organize the web, along the lines of what Google does. But as I've been setting up the site these past few days, I've been thinking mostly about something I said on a panel a few years back that Basic Books put together on "the future of the public intellectual." The Nation ran it in its entirety but the relevant bits are here:

I think one of the things that started happening--actually, this is just starting to happen--is that in addition to these new publications, you're starting to see something on the web that is very unique to it. The ability to center your intellectual life in all of its different appearances in your own "presence" online, on the home page, so that you can actually have the equivalent of an author bio. Except that it's dynamically updated all the time, and there are links to everything you're doing everywhere. I think we've only just begun to exploit it--of combating the problem with the free-floating intellectual, which is that you're floating all over the place and you don't necessarily have a home, and your ideas are appearing in lots of different venues and speaking to lots of different audiences.

The web gives you a way of rounding all those diverse kinds of experiences and ideas--and linking to them. Because, of course, the web is finally all about linking--in a way that I think nothing has done quite as well before it. And it also involves a commitment to real engagement with your audience that perhaps public intellectuals have talked a lot about in the past, but maybe not lived up to as much as they could have.

So that's what I'm most looking forward to here: the ability to yoke together all the different threads of my life -- mostly writing, but also the speeches I'm doing, and other projects, and perhaps more personal bits. We'll see how it goes.