I avoided Blogging for a long time

I have a number of friends who hopped on the blog bandwagon in its infancy. This led me to check out their blogs and to hit "next blog" a lot to see what other people in the world were putting on their's.
Sadly, most of it is either a) crap or b) daily minutaie that's of little interest other than the people who are featured in uploaded cellphone shots pissed out of their gourds on a Friday night and with their shirts pulled halfway up their chests. Some of the intelligent people I'm lucky enough to know actually had or have blogs that are interesting but, again, largely only to those who are interested in particular subjects. I'm not going to pretend I can do any better...
For several years, I was content to stick to leaving the occasional comment on blogs or using Yahoo! messageboards. The messageboard I most frequented ended up as a forum for discussions on many issues. Though the board itself was linked to the Israel/Palestinian conflict, the people who used it had, during the course of some 3 million posts, established relationships way beyond just commenting on that particular issue. I had a lot of good conversations about literature, music, family, religion, politics etc. on that board.
About a month ago, Yahoo! got its ass all in a knot and announced it was changing the way it operated its public forums. Its stated reason was that the boards had become dominated by a few people and it wanted to encourage more dialogue. So, it made a new format that's much more difficult to use. This is the Internet equivalent of New Coke: prohibit your users from the format they like in order to attract people who aren't interested in your product anyway. It's quite the marketing strategy to piss off your customers with no evidence you're going find new ones. What's now been established on Yahoo! is the same people having the same conversations in a much more stilted manner. I can't be bothered. What Yahoo! really needed to do was police itself better to discourage the really racist, derogatory and sick posts.
So, it's blog time. I'm going to try to stick to the point of blogging, which, IMO, is the expression of personal points of view, rather than uploading articles or lots of links. Or, maybe I'll just abandon the idea altogether. I can probably be just as boring as most everyone else.