Dave Winer asks that bloggers respond to his post on The Writers' Web.  In re-reading it, the tenet that resonates most with me is "Open, for real".  One of the reasons I've been blogging so long is for the reasons he describes there: using small components loosely joined that can be replaced as appropriate, and formats that are long-lived because they're simple, to maintain something that I use for most of my adult life.

'Course, I'm a software guy, so I was forced to come to that realization over time in my professional life.  It took me a few years to understand the tradeoff between the simplicity of an all-in-one tool and the flexibility of a set of small interconnected tools, and get off the Microsoft bandwagon where the tradeoff for making everything relatively simple was to lock me into a non-standard development process that was driven ever faster by the thousands of developers they had in-house.  I remember realizing that I was having to charge people to replace perfectly functional software after a few years with rewrites because the underlying MS-based toolset had been discontinued and I couldn't just replace or extend any small part.  The solution was to move to the open-source environment: Linux, gcc, simple text tools like wiki, blog, markdown, HTML, ANSI SQL, PNG.  Self-hosting collaborative tools, so they couldn't be altered or removed.  Paths to migrate any data from one simple format to another, should it be required.

For the same reason, I host a blog server on a generic hosting service and post my thoughts there.  I have no interest in being widely read, nor do I want to find all this text removed or edited because whatever service I had mistakenly chosen to use as a publisher decided not to let it remain.  I think most of the non-technical people I know choose to use the all-in-one product because of the low bar to entry, and I applaud Dave for trying to replicate that with his Tech for Poets series, but it's still harder to use collections of tools together than one big tool, built by a big company that has to see a return.

Incidentally, I see WordLand as a great addition to this collection of small tools.  I've used WordPress because I can self-host it, it requires a minimal amount of maintenance and it used to have a low overhead for posting new stuff.  But at some point the ambitions grew, and it evolved from the straightforward journalling system it had been into a Content Management System and simply pushing content onto my blog became onerous.  So I didn't post as much.  Now, with WordLand, it's simple again, and as a result I'm posting many more items.

I keep a blog mostly to note down thoughts and links to which I'd like to return and which I occasionally want to share.  Not every writing system is for publication.  Not every system is for serving advertising, nor for engaging in tit-for-tat argument.  Sometimes you want to just dash off a thought, sometimes you want to write an essay.  It's a web, not a monoculture.