Aye, there's the rub. Blogging is all well and good, but you gots to have a theme. Scattered musings on the state of consumer culture, the deplorable lack of food in public restrooms, and your favorite trance-rap band just don't serve to generate a community of like-minded folk. And when you get right down to it, I think that might be the whole point of blogging - at least, for me. It almost has a angelic choral overtones to it, doesn't it?

A community of like-minded folk.

I even considered using that as the title of the blog, except that it sounds a bit like it's going to be some off-center political rant, and that isn't really my intent, so perhaps not a great choice.

What is my intent? There are several pieces of advice that come to mind here:

• Go with what you know
• Go with what you like
• Pick something with depth that will allow you roam

And in my life, those all point to “creativity and software,” so that's what I'm going to focus on.

Now all I need is a title.

I've been doing a lot of video editing lately - or trying to - and this experience has brought me to the following conclusions: some tools are powerful; some tools are simple; but the the powerful ones are too complicated; the simple ones are simple in the wrong way; all of them require more horsepower than they should; and none of them support a sketching mode.

Armed with this litany of dissatisfactions and my theories about creativity facilitation, I've set out to design a completely different approach to video editing. This investigation goes by the code-name VSpeak, and I'll report back here once I've completed my initial thinking and tinkering.

Some of you may remember the blog I ran for several years - the original Jefficus World. It was in the days before the Facebook craze, and I used it largely to keep my extended family up to date on the kids' lives, and the occasional technical note or wild musing. But a spam fountain took out the server and by that time, I'd lost interest. Or maybe it was focus that was missing. At any rate, I allowed Jefficus World to sink beneath the waves of time.

Yet here I am, contemplating the ascension of a new blog. How will this one be different, you might ask? Well, for one thing, if I do this thing, I'm going to do it with a more focused theme. I'm still musing on what that theme might be, and I don't expect to stick by it religiously, but with a bit more focus, I hope I'll have a better chance of building a niche audience and staying the course. Stay tuned…