Free to Change

05-27-2008 | 11:59 AM EST

It's been nearly six weeks since I started this blog, and I'm already announcing a major change to its focus!

When I first started posting here, I had a somewhat vague idea about what exactly I'd talk about. In general, I knew I wanted to write about the ways that culture (particularly digital content) is being produced, consumed, regulated, and distributed. I knew that more and more people were applying the ideas behind free/open source software to everything from education and music creation to medicine and photography, and I thought I would use this blog as a place for me to learn more about that and to share what I was learning.

Well, it didn't take too long for me to realize that there are already a ton of fantastic blogs and websites on precisely this topic. Honestly, I just didn't see how blogging on the same things in the same way would do much good. But, in reading other blogs and websites I noticed that most of them are written for the people who already care and know a lot about the topic. When I would tell people offline about my blog, though, they often had no idea that these things were going on. They were genuinely interested, but the terms and ideas that seem so familiar to me (and that show up in most posts online) were completely foreign to them. This gave me the idea for Mine all Mine's new direction.

Moving forward, I'm going to focus on a smaller set of key concepts, I'm going to explain the jargon and key concepts in my posts, and I'm going to write each post trying to answer the question, Why should I care? I'm hoping that by purposefully trying to reach the people who are directly affected by all of this (consumers of any sort, artists, musicians, software developers, etc.) but don't know it yet, I can reach a new audience. An audience that would care, if the information were put into more familiar terms to them.

On a side note, if you've been following this blog, you may notice that some of the keywords used to describe post topics have changed. The posts themselves are the same, but in an effort to focus more tightly on a key set of ideas, I've re-labeled the tags used to describe the posts. And, actually, I think the new keywords are probably more relevant to the content anyway.