My Blogging Goes to 11

Eleven years ago, today, I delved into the world of blogging and am still scratching my head about why.

When DW and I lived in South Korea, from 1997 to 1999, the best way to keep in touch with family and friends was through e-mail, which was still relatively new to us. When I started sending electronic correspondence, I had been a subscriber to National Capital FreeNet. Imagine my surprise to learn that this service was still in business.

Throughout Korea (also, still to this day), Internet cafés were everywhere. DW and I were regular customers of a shop on the third floor of a building that was in the university district of Deokjin-dong, home to many inexpensive restaurants, stationery shops, and bars—including SE and Urban Bar. This Internet café overlooked a narrow road and a wall that surrounded Chŏnbuk National University.

Using NCF was a slow process, as I had to tunnel into a connection. This meant great lag times in typing, and was incredibly frustrating. Luckily, DW and I learned of a new e-mail service, Hotmail, that had just become popular, and we abandoned NCF for this faster service.

This was before Microsoft bought Hotmail.

I would write to my parents fairly regularly, about three or four times a week, to let them know how DW and I were coping with our new environment, jobs, and people. But once a month, I would write a lengthy message and address it to all of our family and friends in our contact list—back then, that was just over 50 e-mail addresses.

These newsletters would describe DW's and my impression of Korea: the food, the culture, the people. I would write about how we had settled, about our typical day of teaching, about how we spent our leisure time, and about the sites we would see on weekends, when we ventured outside of Chŏnju.

I would write Brownfoot Newsletter and the month in the subject line of these messages. DW and I would receive responses from our family and friends, ever-curious about how we were getting on. When the Korean economy took a nosedive, our friends were concerned. When we returned from an interesting trip, there were all kinds of questions.

When I described an evening in which I had been abducted, family and friends actually picked up the phone to see if I was okay, even though the event had been a couple of weeks old.

When we returned to Canada, DW and I were in easy touch with the people to whom we had written while in Korea, and so the newsletters slowed, then stopped. I missed sharing thoughts and news, but I wanted to try something different from sending out an e-mail.

On March 12, 2008, I wrote my first blog post. I introduced the Brownfoot Journal with photos and descriptions of the snow storm that dumped more than 50 cm on Ottawa in just over 24 hours. I remembered that storm in a Wordless Wednesday post, about two years ago.

In following weeks, I shared what my family and I were doing, mostly to do with the kids and their activities. When the Brownfoot Journal posts were published, an automatic e-mail notification went to the people who had kept the most in touch over the time in Korea.

Over the years, the blog gained more readers and I realized that not just my family and friends could learn about the Brownfoot family. After more than three years, I finally closed down that blog and concentrated on The Brown Knowser, which will celebrate its eighth anniversary in June.

I once told myself that I would keep The Brown Knowser running for a maximum of 10 years. Come 2021, we'll see... maybe this blog, itself, will go to 11.