Navel-gazing

I just want to assure you that there is a point to all of this. It's not, I hope, just navel-gazing meta-blogging. I can hear the voices in the chorus: "Doesn't he know that Plaxo tried to do this identity thing years ago?" ... and: "Oh, how cute. He's trying to invent Facebook from first principles." I hope this is not the case, but truthfully I don't really know exactly where this is heading. It'll just take some time to develop the themes we want to talk about. Now that I'm not working I can take the time!

But just like no one visits the same Las Vegas, no one visits the same Internet. My experiences are just that: my experiences. Yet I will boldly share my opinions as if they are facts. You, gentle reader, need to figure out which is which -- and call my attention when I'm ignoring something obvious.

Tags

My previous post was not really part of the central mission of this blog, was it? So we're faced with another decision: how do you share different aspects of your personality, or expose different facets of your online identity? Should I keep this blog tightly focused on the tales of developing a persistent online indentity and then start up another blog for more personal stuff? Or should I have posted that on facebook? What about when I want to share other passions of mine, like music or programming or gadgets -- should I start up separate blogs for those too?

I think a better solution is to use tags and expand the mission of the blog somewhat. So that's what I've done ... I've attached tags (or as Blogger calls then, "labels") to each of my previous posts, and you can see in the right margin that there's a little directory of the different tags. Of course, that's placing a little bit more of a burden on downstream consumers (that would be "you"). It would be nice to be able to pick and choose which aspects of me you'd like to follow. But that's more of a universal problem, and it's all part of this discussion.

I guess one way to think about it is that maybe I'm just treating this blog as a medium, not a message. Perhaps this blog is just a hosting vehicle for serving and categorizing 500-word posts that spans all kinds of subjects. I don't think that's completely true, but we'll see how things evolve. For now, we'll just tag this as a "meta-blogging" post and move along.

Hello, my name is ...

Why hello there! It's been a while since we've connected. Welcome to my new blog, "* Power" (I call it "star power", but if you want to call it "splat power" I won't stop you). Why is it called that? We'll get into that some other time. In the meantime, please allow myself to introduce ... myself.

My name is Eric Lunt, and here are some vitals:

• Live in Tower Lakes, IL
• Currently work at Google in Chicago
• Co-founder of FeedBurner in the CTO role
• Lucky to have a supportive wife and three great kids
• Graduated from Barrington High School in 1988, Princeton University in 1992
• Been coding in Java pretty much non-stop since 1996
• Previous companies: Accenture (back when it was Andersen Consulting), Burning Door, Digital Knowledge Assets, Spyonit.com, 724 Solutions

There, is that enough SEO seeding?

I had a blog for a while called "Dancing About Architecture" that is in cryognic storage. I think all of the links still work, but none of the comment stuff works since it's just a snapshot. I'm going to point my blog feed over to this blog after I get this post done, so if you're seeing this as a new post in your feed from an old subscription: nice to see you again!

I'm just going to let this be a short introduction post for now and I'll get into my motivation for starting a new blog with a subsequent post. Thanks!