I've always thought that the daily-post-oriented publishing system was a great idea; by collapsing the tricky bits of building navigational context into simple chronology, it puts expressive web publishing in the hands of people who want to write. But somehow I never had the time to blog, though I very frequently found myself making quick notes about web content and ideas to FirstClass conferences, which amounted in many ways to blog posts.

Part of the problem was that none of the personal publishing systems really appealed to me - collaboration and shared organisation are crucial to the way I would naturally annotate the web. So, for years, we've been thinking of writing or adapting a weblogging system to suit our own ways of writing. We've finally done it! 'knotes' for Plone will be released within a week or so (on which subject much more to come.. :O). This blog, of course, is powered by knotes.

So it's time to start blogging! Watch this space - and perhaps some other blogs which I'll document here - for thoughts, documentation, argument and discussion about the kind of things that matter to me: mostly about how to improve web technology to enable effective collaborative knowledge-development (of which I see learning as a special case), especially about harnessing the power of Open Source and Open Standards initiatives to create blistering new kinds of software that unleash the creative potential of real people.