Wo0t!

Ladies and gentlemen, it’s time for a celebration. A lot of things have happened this year, but this may overshadow them all. There may just be no newsworthy stories as big as this one. What is this ‘news of news,’ you ask? Well, none other than the official post that brings this year’s blog entries to the highest number of any previous year! That’s right boys and girls, this post is my 12th entry this year, which surpasses my previous record total of 11 in 2007. This has been my most productive year as far as blogging goes. Not only has it been my most productive, but there is still over a month left in the year, so who knows how high that number will go!

What should this blog post be about? What does a record post deserve by way of contents? Well, perhaps a little history about the blog itself. As you can see from the sidebar, I’ve had this blog since 2006. The blog itself however, evolved from a mass e-mail update that I used to send out. In November of 2004, I found myself headed to South Korea. I had never been outside of North America, and really, I was just a kid who had a lot to learn. Friends and family wanted to keep in touch with me and know how and what I was doing in this new country. I also wanted to keep in touch with them. This spurred me to gather a list of e-mails to people who wanted to stay abreast of all my happenings. I sent out my e-mails to four groups, because the amount of people who wanted to receive the e-mails was too big to be sent out at once. The e-mails were really probably the best way for me to keep in touch with people, as they were able to reply, and we could converse back and forth on different issues or ideas I offered in my e-mails. The contents of the e-mails included anecdotes from my daily life, lines of thought I had been thinking over, and insights into personal and spiritual subjects. For over a year I sent out a monthly update, and had a positive response from people.

If I had a positive response, why the change? The answer is simple. Pictures. E-mail was not a convenient way to send large amounts of photos and/or videos. I wanted to highlight my stories with pictures and videos to give a more vivid idea of my life here in SK. A friend told me about ‘blogging,’ and I decided to give it a go. By this time, my e-mail updates were sporadic, because I had left Korea for about 3 months, and wasn’t sure about the validity of sending out the e-mail. I returned to South Korea, but didn’t have the same motivation to send out monthly e-mails.

The blog began as a way to share stories. I decided to blog approximately once a week. My goal was to make a video every week about my life and post them on the blog. I had been doing this with myspace, but would now switch everything to my blog. So the inception of the blog was primarily media focused, not necessarily updates on my life. Over time, I began posting some of my own thoughts and reflections, which garnered me a positive response, including readers who I had never met. The blog then kind of fell into disarray, as I would lose focus with regards to it and never really have a good motivation for it. Getting married, having a child were all nice things for me to write about, but I wasn’t really sure what my blog was supposed to be about, and I could e-mail or skype people to talk about those events. I created a separate blog (there’s a link on the sidebar) to post my studies in the Bible, and tried to do a podcast of my sermons. I just couldn’t stay focused on the tasks, and didn’t maintain them properly though.

This last year saw me decide to post weekly (which has also been adhered to sporadically), thus the jump in posts this year. Over the next month, I will be thinking about how to take this blog forward. What should the contents of my blog primarily be? Should I change the title? I’m not sure about where the direction of this blog is going to go, but next year, things will be different! I hope. I believe it would be a profitable endeavour for me to maintain this blog and to use it to map out my life, the question is whether I should focus the contents of the blog on one specific part of life, or keep the blog sort of all-encompassing, about everything? What are your thoughts? What should this blog look like in the future? Are there any specific things you want to see with this blog?

Here’s to a year of records, and a wide-open future of blogging!