To blog or not to blog...

That is the question...

And it's a good one. Why bother to do it?

Eat Words is a worldwide community of independent professional food writers. All of us mainly make our living selling words to editors and publishers. Our gathering space, our virtual common room, is the Eat Words email discussion list, a closed list for members only. It's here, safe within ourselves, that we freely share our enthusiasms, passions and gripes, our professional and personal knowledge, contacts and friendships.

Why then, this blog? The answer, I suppose, is 'because it's there'. Because emerging new media technologies create opportunities for collaborative publishing that didn't exist before. Because sometimes our words go beyond ourselves and deserve to be shared with a wider audience. Because we write and want to be read. We blog, therefore we are.

Personally it's my view that our 'blogarithms', as John calls them, ought to remain mainly spontaneous and we should all feel confident to use this space freely to express ourselves on any food-related issues that concern and interest us. Remember, this is a medium that is even more ephemeral, more here-today-gone-tomorrow by nature than even something as fleeting as an electronic web page. Eats, shoots and blogs? Nah. Life is too short to worry about the occasional split infinitive or misplaced comma, no? Let's just do it! (And of course if we are so inclined, we can always correct, revise, edit — even delete — later...)

So I simply urge us all to play with words: to put them up, take them down, chew them up, gnaw them to bits, roll them around in our mouths, swallow 'em or spit 'em out. Above all taste, savour and enjoy the beauty - and the sheer fun - of language and food!

I'm certainly looking forward to sharing this journey with you - and with our readers, whoever and wherever in the world you may be.

Marc