Day 1

It is about time that I jump into the world of blogging. I have spent too much energy using earlier generation technology such as e-mail to broadcast information. It is easy to see how this streamlined form of digital diaries offers great potential. Typepad seems to be the ideal choice for hosted blogging where you don't want the cares of supporting your own software and hardware. I like their various levels of sophistication, from simple blogging to features that allow control of privacy for closed community blogging.
I also set up our first dedicated family website. Up until now I have only used temporal sites such as the university site, I decided it was time to have a permanent digital presence. I chose www.1and1.com due to their commercial strength and very affordable pricing. It became obvious pretty quickly that their support for blogging was too primitive, so I chose to create and link a subdomain to make the whole thing pretty transparent.
Typepad also seems to offer some interesting capabilities to publish various lists, so far I have used amazon.com for maintaining some lists, but it is pretty obvious that they are primarily geared toward selling more goods and don't really accomodate lists of things they don't sell. However Amazon can't be beat for researching books and opinions. They seem to have an opportunity to triangulate user's reviews with their listmania lists so that users can find new content and references based on their agreement with user's reviews and interests.
My biggest concern online is where to draw the privacy line with publishing. Sharing presents great opportunities to expand your relationships, but the risks are less obvious. Risks that come to mind range from spam, to the permanence of opinions on the web that may have long since changed, to more dark 'stalker' scenarios.