Ever since I first wrote a short text titled “Not a Damn Blog” back in August 2002, I’ve been watching with some interest the emerging trends in internet technology, and the ways they’re being described, jargonised and lionised.

The good news, from an observer’s point of view, is that not a lot has changed. That’s the bad news too.

We’ve entered a new “tech bubble”, without anyone quite realising it. It’s still about hyperbole and over-valuation, but the action isn’t on Wall Street this time. Instead, it’s taking place in convoluted blog threads, and the commodity being shifted is buzzwords; a new one seemingly every month.

Will the bubble burst? I’m honestly not sure. The nature of language development suggests that we’ll see more of a deflation, the majority of buzz phrases fading into obscurity after a few short months or years of excitement.

I’ll tell you one thing, though: it’ll be an absolute hoot for cultural historians years from now.

I’m frustrated in an unexpected way by a lack of internet connectivity in my apartment at the moment.

In short, the fact is that I can’t do a lot of the programming I’d like to do without an internet connection.

This isn’t because it suddenly prevents me from firing up a text editor and bashing out the code which is flitting around in my subconscious; far from it.

But without the internet I have no access to any of the code libraries I might want to install to support my applications, and I also have no way of testing the pieces of code which need to communicate with other machines elsewhere out there on the network.

There are lots of lovely tech developments to look out for, according to The Guardian’s 2003 Survival Guide . Shame then, that a lot of the piece is complete bollocks. Let’s burst a few bubbles, shall we?

Just what the hell is a blog anyway? I mean, this is just a personal site, where I can put stuff that I’ve done or thought or created or find interesting. And it’s no different from the day-book of an 18th century scholar, the diary of a 1950s teenager, or the 1997 personal website of an early(ish) internet adopter.Yet suddenly, everything’s a damn blog. Well, this isn’t. It’s a personal site. I’m suspicious of trends at the best of times, especially when the media grab them so enthusiastically by the throat and wave them about until they asphyxiate. I’m even more dubious when a trend involves making up stupid new words which are, it turns out, the only truly new thing about the whole phenomenon.

So, this is not a blog. Just so we’re clear on that.