There’s plenty of intellectual pondering about “why blog?” My reason is a pragmatic one: I think I need a web presence, a place for http://www.scherlis.com to land. My previous hand-tooled website — edited with pride in NOTEPAD, and with the snappy graphics of the CERN home page, circa 1992 — was painfully old, and old-looking.
Meanwhile, the blog — as a high-level structure for web content — has become not just a standard, but the default web presentation. There are bad aspects to this, that I am likely to discuss in later postings. For now, I’m online, I look current-century, and I expect to populate this page with various of my presentations and papers, and with thoughts on interactive media, user experience, and on online-community.
I’m trying WordPress.com, because it seems to be the least-constrained tool in terms of insisting on the universal blog-format page. In other words: you can create generic old-school web pages. Hilariously, wordpress.com feels a need to tout and explain this as something new: “WordPress.com has a feature called ‘pages‘ which allows you to easily create web pages.”
More soon!
Dan Scherlis 
Welcome to the blogosphere Dan. I use Typepad and they also recently reported, with much fanfare, on their own ‘pages’ feature. I remember thinking exactly the same thing.
I shall be adding you to my feed reader immediately!