As I write this blog, I'm in London, attending @media. I've been on the verge of officially launching Havoc Inspired v2 for a few days, but I keep finding little tweaks I want to make. It wasn't long ago that I was reading Jeffery Zeldman's blog on the vanishing personal website, and Paul Boag's responding blog on does it really matter. It was only after a length discussion with a friend, Paul Stanton yesterday evening that my thoughts on the subject had come to some kind of fruition. Paul had asked the question, "Why blog? What's the point in trying to build a community around your site when there are services like Twitter out there?" It did get me thinking, but I also realised that I'd already been considering it all along, on a some what subconscious level, because I think my perspective of a blog has changed over the last year or so, and I'd been taking that into account with my design.

Time was that the primary way to get your voice "out there" was to write a blog. All the "greats" of the web industry have blogged for years, and many where among the first ever to blog. But with the introduction of more and more social networks and services, like Facebook, Twitter and Flickr the need to write frequently has reduced. In the past, blogs where treated as a type of online journal, stamped with a date. If you wanted to know what a blogger was doing last week you looked in their archive around that time period, but now we have Twitter and that‘s no longer needed, you can just look back at their history. The same goes for photographs, bloggers would integrate a gallery into their sites or simply embed images into their blogs to show what they had been up to, but with Flickr that's no longer needed either. So a big chunk of blogging has now been replaced with much easier and much more focused services. But that doesn't negate the need for a blog in my opinion; it just means that a person writes fewer blogs in conjunction with what they are doing through their other online presences.

The various social networks offer very powerful API's to allow you to integrate them into your site and that's what I intend to do throughout Havoc Inspired. I'm not going to replicate my content, onto this site, instead I'm going to just offer a glimpse of "what I'm doing over there" and if people are interested they can follow through. People are already starting to take this approach with their sites; a great example is Elliot Jay Stocks site and I think this is the direction that personal sites as a whole are heading in.

So I'm really pleased to be blogging again. I hope some of you find what I have to say useful and I think it will be interesting to see were people come from to read my blog, and were they go too once they have.

In the mean time welcome to Havoc Inspired. It's not perfect and there are bits missing at the minute, such as a sensible link to my RSS feed (see the site information at the bottom), but I'm trying to get out of the habit of polishing absolutely every I release to a crystal shine, and instead just getting it out there and seeing what happens.