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She Has A Blog?! - How I Began Blogging

I finally saw Julie & Julia last night. Loved it! The movie is a true story about a 'lowly cubicle worker' (Julie Powell) who decides to transform her reality by becoming a food blogger. Julie assigns herself a monumental project, a theme for her debut blog, cooking Julia Childs' Mastering The Art of French Cooking.

There were some funny parallels for me in this story. Like Julie, I love cooking. Like Julie, I was struggling with some career angst when I turned to blogging as affordable mental health therapy. But unlike Julie I was in Silicon Valley and my perspective on blogging was quite different. My workplace (AOL) encouraged blogging, and I remember my coworker Holly getting all the love in the office just for going to geeky after hours meet-ups (like Mobile Mondays) and writing about it. At the same time one of my friends was rocketing to the all-time blogging hall of fame, winning webby awards year after year, just for sourcing and posting the cutest photos of baby animals.

I guess I was a little jealous of Meg, but not so much of Holly. Neither of these two ladies got me to start blogging, I'm not competitive that way. When you work for any company everything you create, all that you write or draw, BELONGS to that company. The company, not you, owns your work. On top of that I had a retarded manager at AOL who was constantly 'cherry picking' other peoples ideas among other things (like playing favorites with only male coworkers!!!). Like Julie my thought process to begin blogging went like this; I could while away my days for an egomaniac who obviously doesn't respect me  - OR - I can be the master of my own time with all these great web 2.0 tools at my disposal? So I quit and I started working as an independent consultant.

Blogging for me has been a revolution. I started mostly to learn about how it works, so I could design and develop blogs for clients. I wanted to understand how a blog works with search engines, how it affects a business, and all the different ways one could use a blog as a software tool.  I found myself in the middle of a communication revolution.  This blog, Info Geo, is more than my journal, it's an ongoing experiment in internet communication... it's a laboratory for ideas. 

So THAT is how I began blogging & I haven't looked back. Now, you will notice that I have no advertising here (that's only because Adsense won't work well enough here). I hardly write every day (I'm just too busy right now). But believe me - there will be a lot more to come.
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