An International Community

Blogging has reawakened my interest in the internet.

After years of using the internet, I had begun to feel that it, like much of everything else in our society, had been taken over by commercial interests. While I enjoyed the convenience and savings of ordering software and hardware for my Macintosh from the net, I wasn’t willing to pay $40 a month for the convenience.

Even when I did find articles on the web, they were often useless, either little more than encyclopedia articles or written with an obvious bias.

Personally, I found it more and more difficult to find intellectually stimulating ideas on the web. Either I didn’t know how to find them, or I was unwilling to wade through the tons of pages looking for relevant material.

Since finding blogs several months ago, though, I have a renewed interest in the internet. First, as mentioned in an earlier blog, I found some great sources of articles on the web and I didn’t have to spend hours doing it. Some of those sites are found in my links section, but I still rely daily on wood s lot.

More recently, I found several personal, philosophical sites that are close to my own personal philosophy, yet with a different enough perspective that I use them to inspire and to help refine my own thinking, sites like Cloud 9 , The Obvious? and whiskey river. I’ve even enjoyed briefly exchanging emails with some of them, but more importantly than that, I feel like there is another community, an international one at that, that I am a part of and that inspires me to focus my ideas and put them down on the page.

This community may not offer the kind of feedback that a personal dialogue does, but, at its best, it reminds me of an international university where ideas are shared among colleagues.