The end as we know it

Today is the last day that this blog will count towards my grade, and I thought that I'd reflect on myself and my plans for future blogging.

I will not be continuing this blog, not because I do not want to, but because I need to start something that fits me more, and while new media and journalism of the web are two topics that I am interested in, it's not my passion.

I am taking Online Journalism in the spring and that class too will require a blog, and this class has helped me learn that a blog can be powerful because it can be unique and if it can grab people's attention, it can become big. My hope is that I can combine my passion of baseball with blogging and bring what I have to offer to the online community. My idea is to blog much like how Buster Olney blogs on ESPN.com, but with a twist: adding a podcast about twice a week that offers something like sports talk radio, but only more intelligent. I won't reduce myself to their levels. I think I have a co-host lined up and now it's just a matter of acquiring some audio tools and software and learning the ins and outs of podcasting. That's going to be my project during Christmas vacation and hopefully, I'll be able to launch in early January.

I guess the great thing about the Internet and blogging is that you can start anytime. You just have to be persistent and have a product that sells. Yet the funny thing is, I feel like I missed out on the whole Internet explosion. In 1999, I started my own Web site on a hosting server and the site's purpose was to allow me to post commentary on events happening in Major League Baseball and to post database information for people to read that wasn't found on the Internet at the time. I had it all: winners of the MVP of every season, what ballpark the Mariners played in and what its capacity was, even the all-time leaders of every major statistical category. I basically took what I had in my almanacs and stat books and reproduced it online. And I did it before Baseball-Reference.com was ever started (that site was launched Feb. 1, 2000).

However, I was one teenager doing this on Microsoft FrontPage with no programming skills whatsoever. I haven't updated the site since January, 2003 and now obviously the blogging and searchable database sites have exploded, and I'm sitting here taking a class on it. In a naive and egotistical sort of way, I'd like to think that I was a pioneer for all this, even though maybe only 20 or so people have ever seen this site (I'm not posting the link or giving out the address for it because I don't want to invoke the past). I was doing something back then when no one was doing it. Heck, Google had just become a company and its search engine was still in beta when I was doing this site. Maybe if I had learned a little something about how to design and market a Web site back then, I could have kept it going.

Now, I'm just another college student trying to make a name for himself. Well, life is all about second chances, right? Maybe, this blog/podcast will take off and I can redeem myself. We'll see.