I’m cur­rent­ly try­ing to wrap my head around an idea that best con­veys “my per­son­al brand.” It’s not easy. It also requires an embar­rass­ing degree of self-aware­ness. I think that the end­ing of Bar­ton Fink prob­a­bly sums it up best.

In the mean­time, I’m going to be exper­i­ment­ing here on my new blog. What’s it going to be about? Well, me, and the peo­ple and things that come into my life. It’s a wel­come change from Black­mail Is My Life, which I’ll be shut­ter­ing in the near future. I have no inten­tion of import­ing that con­tent. It, like most of the work I’ve done on the web, will be left in the pixel­lat­ed past.

After care­ful con­sid­er­a­tion, I decid­ed to keep my own name as the blog’s title. It’s not as sexy and enig­mat­ic as Black­mail Is My Life, but it’s much eas­i­er to find out what I’m up to, which isn’t easy when you’re blog­ging under an alias for rea­sons that were nev­er real­ly clear. I’ve tried as best I can to claim the web ser­vices I use in my own name, or a pho­net­ic approx­i­ma­tion like “jay­teer­am­say.” That way it’s abun­dant­ly clear that I’m post­ing in my own voice and stat­ing my own opinions.

I want to give a shout to Kei­th Fitzger­ald, who’s been the cap­tain of this ship so far. He’s a gen­tle­man and a schol­ar, not to men­tion the sort of tech­nol­o­gy geek who’s not foolin’ when it comes to know­ing his stuff, and know­ing what’s best on the web.

This blog will be devel­op­ing apace as Kei­th and I col­lab­o­rate on what makes best sense for what I want to do with my new home on the net. My goals are mod­est: I want to cre­ate an envi­ron­ment that com­bines my con­tent from around the web with­out clut­ter­ing the blog. I want it to be as social as pos­si­ble, which means I’m look­ing for your feed­back every step of the way. I want it to be exper­i­men­tal in the sense that I’m going to be try­ing some new things, like incor­po­rat­ing more video con­tent as I see fit.

One thing I will point out is that I intend to make the cat­e­gories a use­ful part of this blog. Instead of attempt­ing to lit­er­al­ly cat­e­go­rize any­thing I write, I’m going to put my mus­ings in cat­e­gories defined by the action verb that best describes what I’m up to. For exam­ple, if I’m writ­ing about a blog or a book I liked recent­ly, you can find that under “Read­ing.” I think it’s far less clut­tered and con­fus­ing that try­ing to put every­thing in its own box, don’t you think?

I’m pret­ty excit­ed about what’s to come.  I’ll show you the life of the mind!