Purpose...

I've recently decided that my online presence needs to be increased. Many of my friends have a rather strong online presence, such as The Pretentious Filmmaker or Paul Skidmore, and many of those people are far more involved in the things they love to do, both professionally and as a hobby, as a result of this online space that they occupy. So I've decided to follow suit.



I've recently begun tweeting more often, though I find that I'm mostly just dumbing down things I've posted on facebook to fit within Twitter's character limit. Of course, this is the opposite of what many of my friends do, which is simply forwarding their tweets to facebook. I find this to be a little lazy, as facebook doesn't translate tweet speak very well, leaving a jumbled up mess of a post. It's messy enough as it is on Twitter. I do have two Twitter accounts. You can follow me by clicking here or on the link to right of my blog. I also have a Twitter account where I simply tweet the time and date of every time I use the restroom. That can be found here to the right of my blog. More on the tweets in a later post.

I blogged once way back in August in a response to a friend's blog post. I'm happy with it, but I'm not sure I want my online persona to consist of ranting about how I disagree with someone. I thought I could do reviews of things I like, such as games I'm playing or movies I'm watching, Al Gore's creation is littered with "10 reasons The Simpsons is the greatest show ever", "Hell Boy is the new Citizen Kane", and "Call of Duty: Black Ops makes it so that the rest video history game be ignored", so why add to that cesspool?

So I didn't blog again until a few days ago. Although the subject of that blog was perhaps to taboo for most of my friends, I think it was then that I discovered what I wanted this to be.

Facebook is an excellent tool for connecting with people but it mostly revolves around updating people on what's going on in your life. Twitter is great for spatting off quick snippets of you opinions, but not a great place to getting feedback. But in a blog, you have as much space as you want to type down your thoughts and then people can share what they think. I realize that a review site accomplishes this, but a review site is also strictly tied to the subject of the reviews. There's so much more to discuss than just the latest film techniques, kart racers, or trends in digital media.

So, I'm opening this up. Let's talk about stuff. I'll ramble on about things going on in my life. Stuff at work, stuff, at church, stuff I'm doing at home. And every now and then something to talk about will come up. Maybe you have question a passage of scripture I've written about. Maybe you disagree with my thoughts on a politician. Maybe you'd like to voice concern about something. That's what I want. I want some engaging conversation about whatever happens to be on the table at the time.

And that is why I've decided to call this little space "The Open Forum".