Educate and excite, inform and infuriate.

Changing the ribbon on a typewriter. Operating an overhead projector. PASCAL-TurboPASCAL. Looking up a business in the Yellow Pages. Mounting photographic slides in slide mounts. Specializing in the distribution, marketing, sales, and repair of HD-DVD players.

If you’re reading my blog at work, and your job is doing any of these, you might wanna just keep reading my blog.

I came across these stats a week ago:

In 2005, the U.S.-led Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria made a financial commitment to attacking those diseases in Uganda. The grant package’s worth totaled $367 million.

In 2008, according to the National Retail Federation, Valentine’s Day spending on U.S. pets was expected to reach $367 million.

I’ll leave it to others to dissect the implications of this Feb. 8 note from NAACP chair Julian Bond to DNC head Howard Dean. In it, Bond uses “the strongest possible terms” to urge delegate representation for Black voters in Florida and Michigan at the Democratic National Convention.

Of course, I deeply respect Bond’s immense legacy and record in civil rights.

But without casting aspersions on him, shouldn’t a person who has faced as many obstacles and dilemmas as Bond be able to spell “aspersions,” “obstacles,” and “dilemma,” not to mention “Michigan”?

The new Knight Rider aired Sunday evening, updating the original David Hasselhoff ’80s TV show for the year 2000, while retaining the original premise. You remember: Michael Knight—here, Mike Tracer (Ooo!)—equipped with an ultra-advanced talking automobile as his primary weapon, roams the highways and byways, fighting crime.

Oh, to be a 14-year-old boy, again.

There’s a rhythm to hour-long, episodic television that’s always been there, I’m sure, but that, for some reason, I really started noticing while watching Grey’s Anatomy. It goes as follows:

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Thank you! people at Funimation for sending me copies of the Afro Samurai and Desert Punk boxed sets. Both animes take place in a futuristic Japan, but only one, it seems, involves a gun-wielding ne’er-do-well with Nadine Jansen-esque breasts. (The character’s name is Junko, “Vixen of the Desert.”)

I’m eagerly looking forward to checking both out. But what I also want for Christmas is another season of Gunslinger Girl, the 2003 series about a quintet of Italian, prepubescent children, each near death, who are rescued, their histories erased, and their bodies revived cybernetically, so that they can become skilled assassins; a clique of little La Femme Nikitas.

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I first learned about blogging with the release of We’ve Got Blog: How Weblogs Are Changing Our Culture (Perseus) in 2002. I’ve resisted doing a blog at least since then.

Why? The biggest obstacle for me, conceptually, was the idea of writing for free. As a working journalist with 20 years of practice, I felt no more comfortable with unpaid writing than, say, a taxi driver might feel giving several hours of daily rides, for nothing.

Another fact was blogging’s promise of new audiences. With bylines in VIBE, The Village Voice, The Source, Billboard, The New York Daily News, and other media; by doing occasional TV appearances; and through producing a weekly radio show, NONFICTION (WBAI-NY / 99.5 FM, Fridays at 2 pm), I didn’t feel particularly hungry for readers or listeners, as an unpublished or self-published writer might.

But I soon realized that blogging was rapidly growing and becoming more influential. I began to see that bloggers were modifying the coverage of mainstream media, and serving as an alternate voice to the establishment viewpoint—the so-called “Rathergate” furor being a prime example of this.

When I looked closer, I also understood that I was already doing a lot of writing for free. I was doing it in internet forums, in lengthy e-mails to friends, in comments on various sites, etc. (Sometimes, it was pretty good writing, too!)

Neither of these realizations was enough to make me want to blog, though. It was only when I directly connected the opportunity blogging presented to developing aspects of my work life—four, to be precise—that I decided to make the leap. (Perhaps you’ve reached similar conclusions about your own output, whether you’re a writer, or not.)

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