Applying the Technology Adoption Life-cycle model to my internet usage pattern, I categorize myself as a Laggard or a member of the Late Majority.

The beginning was more promising: I used e-mail since the early 1990s, and I set up my first web site in 1997. At the dawn of the new millennium, I owned a bunch of domains. I hosted different websites that were effectively blogs. Technically they were not – I created static HTML pages and edited them frequently. I was the first employee in my company who was member of a popular German “Web 2.0” business network.

A few years later, I started an experimental web project with three like-minded netizens; today we would run a blog. I converted all my existing web sites to a simple self-made content management system.

But then, however, when Twitter and Facebook became popular and everybody started to tweet, share, and post – I retired from this chatty online world. I guess the reasons were:

Expressing thoughts online was only important for me when I was about to make important changes in my (professional) life. I did not announce and “market” this change, but I developed ideas while or because I was writing about them. If this was self-marketing, it was paradoxical; the names of my domains were attractive only for peculiar clients.

In any aspect of my life, I tried to stay away from mainstream movements. It was fun putting up a website with a weird name as long as hyperlinks had subverted hierarchy. When CEOs of big corporations started blogging, it lost its subversive appeal.

I do not like tools that allow tracking down my status: when I am online and “available”. My daily working routine comprises ad-hoc troubleshooting and too much online communication anyway. I feel that I already have my share of being online and available.

So, what is actually the reason then for setting up this blog now? I still need to think about this, but I have decided that I will find out as I go by writing this blog!