Announcement

Posted on 05-07-2008 under Announcement

My plan was to post fairly frequently to this blog. I hoped that I’d get into a sort of pattern of behavior and continue. Unfortunately, right now I’m in the middle of a move to another city. Not only is it fairly stressful (quite a few issues came up in the middle of things and the bills are piling up faster than I thought they would), I’m trying to save some money and so I won’t have an internet connection at the new place for at least a couple months.

I’ll try to keep up with things by writing at the coffee-shop on my laptop, but I don’t know if I’ll have the time. Posts will probably be really sporadic here.

Hang in there, I’ll be back at some point.

Posted on 05-05-2008 under Announcement

Why a baywords blog? I mean, I have a Wordpress.com blog, which is essentially the same thing. I have a tumblr account. I have a soup (which is like a tumblog but much, much cooler). Continuing on, I have a Google Reader shared items feed, a delicious account, a twitter account, a Pownce account, etc. ad nauseum, on and on, until the web 2.0 part of my brain pops an aneurism.

Again, why?

Quoting the Baywords announcement:

Many blogs are being shut down for uncomfortable thoughts and ideas. We will not do that. Our goal is to protect freedom of speech and your thoughts. As long as you don’t break any Swedish laws in your blog, we will defend it.

Because TPB and Baywords will give me some notion of respect on the web. Too few services are respecting their users. Too few places take freedom of speech seriously.

I choose Baywords because I can post what I want here.

This is extremely important. I do not have to fear takedown notices, oppression, or persecution. And you might not think I need such protection. After all, I live in a country that claims to have freedom of speech, right? Well, it may never come to be explicitly taken away, but the actions of the government are, at some times, alarming. I’d rather not be censored because “Everything changed after 9/11.” I’d rather not be told what I can and cannot think politically, and I don’t want to be treated as guilty-until-prove-innocent by a terrorism-crazed society and its government.

But I don’t want to set my hopes too high for this blog, or my purpose too narrow; I’ve fallen into that trap before. Take the failure of my Wordpress.com blog: I tell myself that “this is a blog for programming, and discussing my programming projects” and I never posted there again. Instead, I’ll leave the purpose of this blog unstated, and write posts on whatever I want, without any sort of self-censoring.

This isn’t a manifesto. It’s not meant to be. But maybe, someday, if our liberties and freedoms are being threatened, we’ll all rise to the occasion and Baywords will be there.