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I've never blogged before; I think that my particular need to share thoughts in writing manifests itself elsewhere. But I have toyed with the idea from time to time, utterly failing to come up with a unifying theme, assuming I'd just do it under my own name as a person, rather than as a company. I briefly considered documenting my culinary efforts (and failures, which would be far more entertaining), but the idea sputtered fairly quickly-- it was obvious it'd have three great posts and nothing further. As far as pipes go, it would have been terribly odd for me to blog about pipes outside of the Smokingpipes.com context; my love for pipes and my life with pipes is so inextricably intertwined with this company that I couldn't see myself describing one without the other. Other ideas presented themselves, usually when I found something particularly clever and witty. Later, of course, I realized that I wasn't nearly as clever or witty as I'd thought to begin with and that a blog entitled "the woefully self-indulgent musings of a pipe retailer, student of history, and mediocre cook" was just not going to fly.
We'd also discussed a group blog for the website since the earliest days of blogging. In some respects, various iterations of the newsletter provided this, especially the introduction and various columns that have been included over the years. In recent months though, the newsletter has become less fluid. Some of that is a good thing-- we finally figured out what the newsletter should be-- though much of it is a function of the scale of the organizational task that is bringing you the newsletter and the need to regularize it some. Anyway, it's become abundantly clear that the sort of informal and semi-formal 'behind the scenes' commentary that we wanted to provide simply didn't fit the newsletter very well. We have all these different communication channels, but they're all very one-way and all fairly formal: articles on the site, pipe descriptions, newsletter content etc. What we wanted was a fairly informal, somewhat two-way avenue for communication.
So, we started this blog, of which this is the first post. It took a little longer than anticipated to implement because most of the off-the-shelf software out there didn't fit our needs (and long term plans for greater integration with the rest of the site), so we're using a heavily modified version of BlogCFM sitting atop our Postgresql database. Melissa did most of the work for this, so kudos to her.
So, what is this blog and what will it be? For starters, I don't really know. All good projects tend to take on a life of their own and develop characteristics different from what their originators predicted. Still, I do know that this won't be about new products on the site, though we may occasionally mention such. Mostly, I hope it'll serve as something of a backstage pass into life at Smokingpipes.com and give us a place to share general pipe and tobacco thoughts in a less formal, less structured medium. When we sat altogether yesterday (the people I expect to participate most with the blog: Brian, Alyson, Bobby, Eric, Adam, Melissa and me) and discussed it, the only thing we concluded is that this shouldn't really be company communication, it should be communication from a bunch of individuals within the company. Bobby should talk about photography, Adam could talk about pipe making or esoteric estate pipes, Eric could write about, well, writing, Alyson about the process of organizing the update etc. In all, we'll just see what happens. I hope it flowers into something interesting and compelling over the coming weeks. Stay tuned!
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