Been there; launched that?

Where are going?

When do you launch a new blog anyway? Some have suggested acting like it has been there all along, but doesn’t it deserve something like a record release party, with a red velvet rope and a big dude keeping the freaks out?

This is my first personal blog, but in many ways I have always been around.

I posted my first web site in 1995, stealing code from other sites and learning to tweak the HTML with a text editor. The source code within the earliest remnant I could find just now with the Wayback Machine at archive.org indicates I had been using Claris Home Page at the time, speaking of way back.

Next, I tried Freeway for a while, made the best of a couple of Dreamweaver workshops while I was a journalism fellow at Michigan and spent some time with iWeb.

Perhaps obviously, I have been spending a lot of time with WordPress recently, though I am already nervous that I haven’t sufficiently caught up with Ruby or Drupal, and I am still pretending that I never really needed to learn Java or Flash or a dozen other things.

You get the idea. The good news is that my OCD tendencies can come in handy here, but when will I ever need my DOS skills again?

I came back from Blogworld in 2007 and joined 30 social networks sites in one day, a few of which have long since passed. I really only keep up on Facebook and Twitter, and a little bit on LinkedIn, and some Youtube and Tubemogul and blip.tv and I just got started at blip.fm.

Oh, and I have ping.fm duping my Tweets to FreindFeed and MySpace and a bunch of those earlier platforms. 

I have a working News Challenge proposal I call Vidstrib, and have had a portfolio site at jimmacmillan.com for years now, and I had a hand in philadelphiaconference.org, and now I have another half dozen sites in the works that I am not ready to share, or take the blame for.

Links leftover from my MSM career must number in the godzillion, and that doesn’t even count when those clowns spelled my name wrong.

So, I have drifted a long way from the question of when to launch my first blog, but is it really a launch anyway, when I already have content all over the place? Maybe this is more like moving day.

Final points: One can lose perspective; so, I am not sure if everybody who might read this post is already doing everything I do, or if you will find it a little scary. Either way, I have one take-away: If you ever join 30 social networks in one day, use the same login, password and email address. It might have branding value, but I can attest that it will be good for your sanity.