I’m 40 years old, and I’ve been in contact (more or less) with the Internet as it’s grown from inchoate network in the early 1990s to the Thing that it is today. This means that I’ve been aware, and to some extent Rubbernecked, the blogging movement as it has developed. This includes the sector of bloggers who share too much information about themselves online. I’m not one of those. I can’t even say that I’m a blogger. Yes, I’m using the web, but I can’t and won’t claim to be ‘logging’ anything. That’s not the way I roll.

And yet, I’ve actually shelled out real money for this site, this domain, and this WordPress instance. All this after using free stuff like Google+, Posterous.com, and Facebook. Why this, now?

I was happy throwing random thoughts and hot bits of information to my free Posterous site. Most of that information concerned opportunities for students in science and mathematics (STEM) and post-secondary educators in those fields. Posterous made sharing easy, and I loved it. Colleagues and I actually used Posterous as an information portal for courses we were developing with funding from the National Science Foundation. Student were sharing information with one another in ways that we thought were novel and interesting.

This spring, Twitter acquired Posterous. The post-acquisition messages sent out to users of Posterous.com tools suggested that the future of posterous sites was uncertain. (Compare post acquisition messages from the Friendfeed founders to those of the Posterous founders, and you’ll see that the future is bleak.) So now I set Posterous aside and move somewhere else.

I’m not moving much, really. It’s not like I have a voice that I feel must be heard. I’m not distinctive of remarkable in many ways. But I do feel like I have something to say that will make life better for others. Not everybody, but those young people or young professionals who are interested in science, mathematics, or technology and what it has to offer its practitioners and America.

Moving to Tumblr might have been an option, but free services (vis a vis Posterous.com) are more apt to change unexpectedly. Paid services have a tendency to persist. So I looked for an inexpensive web host that offered interesting backend support (for some reason, python was the clincher for me) and went with FatCow along with WordPress. I then grabbed a couple new domain names (one with typos, one with Bergmanian meaning), and dashed together this site between grading final papers.

This is never going to be a great site. I’ll never have scoops, or anything. And I’m not going to take the time to learn the CSS necessary to make this page look sexy or novel. But I will take care to share things here that I’d want to read, as an STEM educator, a lover of good writing, a 30+-something, a human, and a geek. (And I might share some family stuff from time to time.)

I’ll use Google+ to draw traffic this direction, and maybe Twitter. So use those avenues to share comments with me. I’m going to follow Chairman Gruber’s lead and keep comments ‘off’ here. But never infer that I’m not interested on dialogue, conversation, discussion. Just not here.

This has been too much writing with no revision, but it says something that might be important to (my) history. So there it is.