I'll be back soon, I promise.

Rodrigo Sepúlveda, the man behind video publishing on-demand service vpod.tv, is looking for people to share his company's office space in Paris... and he's looking on Twitter!

"I haven't given up blogging," I spluttered, insofar as it's possible to splutter on IM. "I've just been busy."

He seemed even less impressed when I went on to add that, anyway, his assertion that Blogging and I had parted ways wasn't even true - my tumblelog, horreo.org, is anything but inactive.

"But that's just links..."

*

This chat got me thinking about what had prompted me to start a blog in the first place, back when I hand-coded my very first post at this domain in September 2001.

I'd been a blog reader myself for a few months. Choice wasn't so wide in those days, but I did enjoy my regular visits to Sylloge, to kottke.org and to notsosoft (which is no longer online but whose writer now blogs at meish dot org). This seemed like a party I wanted to gatecrash, even I wasn't sure exactly why.

There was the writing, of course. The discipline involved in putting my thoughts into written words on a regular basis certainly appealed to me, as did the idea that I could write more creatively than I was able to do at work at the time.

There was also the community. In the dark ages, many sites didn't have a mechanism for leaving comments on individual posts, but that didn't stop us all from frantically linking to each other from a list of "Sites I like" in our sidebars, and we gradually built up our little communities that way. Many posts I (and others) wrote were often little more than, "I've found this new blog, it's really great: <INSERT LINK HERE>". When the person I linked to discovered my blog through her log files, she would undoubtedly come and see who was linking to her -- and often return the favour if she found we had something in common that she could share with her readers in turn.

And this leads me on to my final point, to what I have come to believe was and still is my main motivation for blogging: a desire to share. The web is home to many wondrous things, and having a blog seemed to be a way for me to point my friends towards some of those things that I considered worthy of their attention.

That's still the case today, really, both here - where I can be more wordy if I choose - and at horreo.org - where I simply point and say, "Go!"

At the end of the day, as my friend observed, it's just links.

I don't have the time - or much inclination, really - to look at what's causing the problem, so I've just removed the dates from each post as a quick fix.

Of course, that means there's now no way of knowing when any particular post was written (although the month still appears in the URL, if you're someone who looks at that sort of thing).

Does that matter?

In any case, it's a pretty theoretical question when you consider that I do most of my blogging on my tumblelog (horreo.org) now anyway.

The theme of the event is "disruptive applications", and they have speakers from a whole range of interesting companies.

If you register now using the promotional code BLETH to identify yourself as a Blethers.com reader, you'll get free access to the VON Expo (worth 92 dollars).

*

In the interests of transparency, I must point out that the organisers offered me a free pass for the event to blog about this, but unfortunately I won't be able to attend. I'm just mentioning it because I think some of you might find it interesting - I hope you do.

I saw a concert last Monday that may well have been the best concert I have ever seen. Certainly there have been bands - any one of the artists I used to obsess over as a teenager, in fact - where I was more excited just to be there seeing them live. But in terms of the sheer visceral, kick-in-the-guts power of the music and the raw emotion that was bouncing off the stage, I have never seen anything like it. As I wrote on the singer's MySpace page afterwards, I have never been so moved by music.

Who was this singer that moved me so? Her name is Nadj.

Listen to some of Nadj's music on MySpace (including a cover of Motorhead's Ace of Spades) and watch the live video of La Pilule to see what I mean.

My tumblelog horreo.org is where I've been doing most of my blogging lately, however. Please take a look!

The "installation view" they sent me, which you can see here, was taken at 12.59pm on Friday 23 March 2007.

How exciting! User-generated content has now even made it into what many think of as the stuffy world of museums.

I'll continue posting longer entries here if I ever have to anything to say that can't be summed up in a pithy sentence or two.

I think I can safely say that this is the first football match report you've ever read in Latin!

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Found via the freshly re-launched Idiomatika Blog

There's now a Twitter badge in my sidebar, and you can also follow me at www.twitter.com/smudie

(In a related post at Click Opera, Momus also has an interesting comparison of the difference between the French obituaries of Baudrillard and the Anglo-Saxon ones.)

When reading this guide I was struck by a remarkable difference from other books about operating systems and the more complicated computer software. The authors not only give you the technical information, but also include background information on how changes and the current state of the feature set came about. This really shows that the authors have been a part of the community surrounding this software.

Thank you very much, David Lawlor. Your kind words are much appreciated.

The song in question - You Could Be A Boy - can be heard on Electric Factory's obligatory MySpace page.

Don't worry, you won't hear me singing - I only wrote the lyrics!

You can find them here: excerpts from the Unofficial Guide to Windows Vista.