Allow Me to Reintroduce Myself

Welcome to my blog!

While this is my first post under this name, I'm far from a newbie when it comes to blogging or creating content for the Internet. I've been blogging personally since 2003, with hundreds of entries under another alias, along with some experience corporate blogging. Check out of one of my entries I did for the radio station Z103.5 here.

So why am I here starting yet another blog?

Well, I have a few reasons:

1) I have to for a school assignment.
2) I want to help my professor and fellow blogger Anthony Kalamut properly format his blog and I couldn't recommend any solutions without using the Blogger interface myself.
3) I want to build a more professional web presence for myself.

Back when I started blogging, my mindset towards the medium was different. I treated it as a personal diary that just so happened to be on the Internet. I never thought anybody else would ever find it.

Then I found out that some of my friends were regularly checking it out to see what I would write about next. Then I started getting comments from people around the world. Then I found my blog on Technorati, and saw that my blog was ranked within the top 1 million in the world.

Normally, it's not that impressive to know that there are close to a million people more popular than you. However, in a blogosphere that has well over 100 million bloggers, it was a cause for pause.

"Wait a minute," I said to myself. "People are actually reading what I have to say?"

For better or worse, there were people that did care about the musings of a high-school-turned-college student venting about his day-to-day drama. It got me really conscious as to the contents of my "online footprint", to the point where I almost went cold turkey. I didn't want to jeopardize myself by posting something on the Internet that I shouldn't. So, I just stopped posting.

The problem with that mindset is, I'm striving for a career in advertising, with aspirations of someday specializing in online, interactive and social media. I'll gladly work with traditional media; I've spent the last 4 years of my life working in the radio business and got into advertising in the first place to further explore roles I could do within the traditional media realm. But my knowledge and passion for online, interactive and social media are arguably the biggest assets I can provide to a company and the assets that set me apart from the rest.

So lets bring it back a bit. How then, do I then sell myself as someone in touch with the online world without anything online to show for it? The answer I came up with: start fresh.

"With great power comes great responsibility."

Yes, it's corny that I pulled out the Spiderman quote, but it's very fitting in this case. A blog is an extremely powerful tool of communication that can change the world. I want to continue using it, but more wisely. No more "hacker aliases". No more muttering under my breath online when I really want to shout out loud. No more trying to hide from accountability. There's nothing wrong with shouting out loud. It's just a matter of making sure I can stand behind everything I shout.

This is my blog, in my name, for the world to see. My goal for this blog is that I want this to be valuable to everyone; from my friends, to my family, to teachers, to future employers. I want this to be the culmination of my writing ability, my creativity, my thought process and my skills working with online tools. I want to be in a situation where anybody that searches my name on Google will find this blog and see the best I have to offer.

Is my answer the right answer? I don't know. But I guess we'll find out soon enough.

Over the course of time, I'll be posting about a variety of different subject matter using different media to help me express myself, such as video and possibly a podcast. Hope you stick along for the ride.