Metaphorically speaking, I'm still not sure if this is my Ghent Altarpiece or my Watts Towers.  Maybe it's a little of both.

I created Notes in a Bottle  in 1998, when blogs were barely a speck on the Internet landscape, because I had some things I felt I needed to say, and I was having only sporadic luck with conventional publishing.   (I'd written for a living at a couple of points in my life, but I wasn't being paid to write about any of the things that were most important to me.)

Some writing that I had posted to The Atantic Online during its early days elicited enough interest to give me grounds for optimistism about my ability to engage online readers.  Also, with a background in software design, I felt I might be able to make some useful contributions to the way writing was presented and consumed electronically.