Back From the Shadows..
In 1999, I created a mailing list on egroups called FOIB (limited archives here).
FOIB stands for “Friends of Ian Bell”, creatively named I suppose but stolen wholesale from FoRK, a list maintained for more than 13 years by my Friend, Rohit Khare.
Unlike FoRK, which is a discussion list, FOIB was mostly a broadcast of the various tributaries of my thoughtstream and about 250 interested parties signed up to tune into my daily rants and reflections on various subject matter.
I’ve found that our motivations for doing things like writing are mostly selfish. You might choose to share your thoughts with folks as a release mechanism, you might opt to set up a blog to increase your status or industry profile, or you might become an advocate because you believe in a cause and are frustrated with the status quo.
FOIB was not really any of that. I was trying to challenge people to deconstruct my often disjointed and paradoxical world view, and offline many of those 250 people did so. I learned a lot in the process.
In 2004, when our business Geekmail failed due to a founder’s dispute, I lost the FOIB listserv (eGroups had folded into YaHoO! so we hosted it ourselves) and decided to go quiet for a while. I discovered that not having people know what I thought about things was sheer bliss.
But, as happens to many self-proclaimed “writers”, I became restless without my pulpit. I did quite a bit of blogging for a company we launched in 2006 called EQO, and though my thoughts were limited in scope I quite enjoyed myself.
Thanks to the encouragement of Lance Tracey I set up my DreamHost account and started tinkering with WordPress. Before I knew it, FOIB was reborn as a blog. And here we are.
Some selected FOIB posts are available here.
Hope you enjoy the ride, and look forward to your comments.
-Ian.
