As a part of running a website hosting company, I get to watch a lot of interesting uses of the web go by, especially the one- or two-person operations and personal websites that we host.
There's M., who posts her beautiful paintings online, M., who runs a little cafe in Illinois that I'll probably never visit, A. who runs a small dry cleaners in NYC and uses the web to handle pickup requests, L., who sells surplus MREs, and T., the rocker/writer/actor/critic who writes for pages and pages about the finer points of the visual and audible arts. It's rewarding to see all of these people using the web to advance their ideas, show off their talents, try out new things, and compete with the noise of the REST of what is an increasingly commercialized and homogenized Internet.
Seeing this phenomenon (which is, I think, actually just the true spirit of the Web showing through) inspires me towards activities like writing in this weblog. It reminds me that I don't have to limit myself to having a web presence only if it's complete, formal, pre-meditated, and purposeful. The web as a medium is just as well suited (if not better suited) for the raw and creative as it is for the commercial and polished. Surely as a viewer, creator, and hoster of many websites, I can enjoy those different modes of online existence equally as well.
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