The Old Pond;
A frog jumps in –
The sound of water.
–Matsuo Basho
Plop! And the frog returns to the pond.
So this is the second incarnation of PaperFrog, a site which started in the spring of 2003. PaperFrog was originally intended to be something of a public side-project for my writing ventures, but gravitated toward Buddhist topics. It eventually become one of BeliefNet’s family of Blog Heaven weblogs, and I thoroughly enjoyed producing it.
By last summer, I was already looking ahead to the creation of Lighter Footstep, a website about sustainability and the environment (and my primary project these days). I knew it was time to allow the frog a well-deserved retirement somewhere in the cool recesses of Basho’s proverbial Old Pond, so I shuttered PaperFrog with a vague promise to perhaps revive it someday.
A year later, I’m often asked for the address of my blog. Frankly, the term “blog” has become difficult to define, and Lighter Footstep — an advertiser-supported web magazine with multiple writers and a wonderful, creative community of readers — doesn’t really for the bill. It seems useful to have a personal site, however, so PaperFrog is back with a fresh coat of paint and new purpose.
Or perhaps I should say an old purpose. I’ve decided to return PaperFrog to its original mission: a site about writing and my projects. Since almost all my work now is on the web, I’ll be writing about content creation, community building, and the technologies which underlie online publishing.
That sounds close enough to a mission statement, doesn’t it?
I’ll make a full-content site feed available for those of you who use Bloglines, Google Reader, or some other RSS client. Please feel free to jump into our Comments if something interests you. And thanks for giving PaperFrog a read.
