BEWA: Sound the alarm! All the letters have been taken.

Sound the alarm! All the letters have been taken. It’s impossible to come up with a new acronym for anything anymore. BEWA, for instance. It’s been used. At least twice. It’s the British Equestrian Writers Association and the Business Educators of Western Australia Inc. It is also a Singaporean fashion brand and a village in Jamtara district of Jharkhand state of India. And I just wanted to start a meme. Not that I really have the ability to do that but, you know, it was an idea.

I hear you cry, “A meme? Are you sure?” And you would be right but indulge me for a moment.

I just paid the hosting fee for curnow.org to the folks a Dreamhost again.  I host my own site on some rented server space there. It’s been with them since 2002 and I can’t remember the company who did it before but I don’t think they are around anymore. The idea was simple: own my own space so I am not at the whim of a dot com business that might not be there tomorrow (this was 2002 and web 1.0’s bubble had well and truly gone bang).  I think I was inspired by Phil Gyford’s website and the idea of collecting all my own web content in one place.

I once wrote that the reason for building a site like this was because, “The ideals of a less censored form of communication, open and available to all, appeals to some deep belief I have in the basics of human community”.1  Of course those are the wild ramblings of an Web 1.0 idealist and you only need looks at the comments on any newspaper website to see how utterly nonsensical I was being.

But, having paid for another year I began to think about why I cough up this money given I don’t really write a great deal here when I could host a simple site for free in many places. Go and check out the beautifully simple curns.me for something along the lines of my original plans for this site.

Then, on Monday, somebody asked me about Google search and websites. I know very little about this. So I did a bit of research and looked at the search terms that got people to curnow.org. So, hello all you Ashley Paske fans (for the kids, he was Matt Robinson in Neighbours sometime in the the last century). There’s a reference to him here and it seems to drive people to look. And the picture isn’t there anymore so I will have to look at that and fix it one day.

So much for the more worthy stuff I wrote about personalised radio and why we should all stop thinking that news is something that can be easily defined.

All this lead me to think that I ought to try and add some new ramblings here just to justify the payment and get people here for some other reason. Which lead to my big idea – BEWA: Blog Every Wednesday in August. Catchy, don’t you think? And so I will try. Don’t hold your breath.

Footnotes

1 Originally written in a post entitled ‘Reasons‘, July 2000

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