I won’t attempt to hide it: I’ve been a terrible blogger lately. I could blame a few things: music projects, Real Work, other projects, having a wonderful daughter and wife that are immensely more fun to be around than computers, you name it.

Having said that, I’ve also had a little less to blog about due to me pushing a lot of news and info that I’d typically blog about through Twitter (you can find me under the name of @flukazoid). I like Twitter because it’s oriented around timely, bite-sized pieces of information. It forces you to not waste words, and functionally it brings that content to life through its network-based community.

That being said, Twitter’s strengths (conciseness in particular) are also its weaknesses, and there’s a lot that can’t be said or communicated with the service.

Over the last couple of months I’ve been thinking about being a little more focused in my use of Twitter and blogging, and have decided that I’m going to use the services like this:

• My Twitter profile will have most most of the news and time sensitive information. I’ll also ramble about stuff I’m listening to, discoveries I’m making, news that’s interesting, gigs I’m seeing. It’ll also have plenty of moments from the rest of my non-musical life, but I hope it’s interesting and entertaining all the same.
• This blog will have (hopefully) more in-depth writing about music, reviews, some more abstract thoughts about music which I have residing in an increasingly large queue. The content on here will hopefully be a lot more pure – less noise and clutter.

So consider this me jumping back into the blogging world, but reserving a lot of content for Twitter. Both are good, with strengths in different places. I’m hoping to use them to their best advantages.

This self-indulgent ramble has now been concluded. Read somebody else’s post, I’m sure it will be of greater value!

Finally – I’ve managed to put a new look Joe.Blog online! This redesign is long overdue – it’s been put off on plenty of occasions thanks to an insane lack of spare time.

There are still bits and pieces that need to be tidied up and improved, but at the very least it re-establishes the blog’s image as being solely a music blog rather than a hodge-podge personal blog that covers all sorts of unrelated subjects (and usually badly). I figure if I stick to one topic I’ve probably got a good chance of getting good at writing about it.

Obviously the actual shift in direction happened a long time ago but I feel doing the revamp puts the identity of the blog in step with its content.

As far as being a “music blogger” goes, I still feel like I’m working out my writing style and what exactly I want to make a priority of covering, but I’m sure that will all click into gear as I keep doing it.

OK, enough on this subject – time to get on with it and actually write about some music!

Yes, I’ve jumped on the twitter bandwagon – or I’m giving it a go, anyway.

Must say it is kind of nice to be able to share spontaneous thoughts / observations / moments with people even when they don’t merit their own blog post. As to whether I’ll maintain any regularity with regards to posting frequency, well we’ll see.

You can see my latest twitter post on the top right hand side of my blog’s home page (sorry about the temporary performance inhibiting JavaScript – I’ll move over to a WordPress plugin shortly TwitterTools seems OK). You can also go to my twitter page.