A choice to suit me

This blogging fad that everyone seems caught in these days is really easy to do. I signed up with WordPress and two minutes later I have a free, advertising free, fully functional blog to which I can post from my web browser, via email, from a third party piece of software, from my mobile phone via either WAP or email or some other service which isn't available on my network yet. I can post directly from Flickr, by clicking "blog this" in my web browser, or via some sort of XML feed which I don't really understand. I can even post voice messages rather than the usual textual ones from a piece of recording software on my phone. Presumably I can post more than just my voice using this.

Wow. I mean really, how many more ways do I need to be able to send my contribution to the publisher with no editors that is the world wide web? Whoever decided that we wanted to blog, obviously didn't trust that it would really catch on unless people could do it however they wanted.

I feel like I'm behind with my gas bill.

"We're sorry to see that you have yet to pay your most recent gas bill. Please call us on our freephone number to arrange an alternative method of payment, or to discuss a payment plan appropriate to your circumstances."

They want their money. Psychologically speaking, if they treat you nicely then you'll probably cough up quicker. Many people do have serious problems making large payments of this kind - not least because the bloody gas bills keep going up - and do need to talk it over with someone. And to be honest, it's a real shame that they're not blogging. But while there is a legitimate need for pre-payment cards, direct debit, quarterly or monthly bills and the like for people's utilities, surely blogging isn't in need of the same softly softly tactics to ensure people keep posting their thoughts.

So I suppose the question is why do we have so many choices when it comes to blogging, when clearly one or two well-understood and convenient ones would do? One explanation is fragmentation. Since it is so easy to post to a blog, it's also easy to write a little bit of software to do the job for you. If no-one else uses your software, so what? Just like the blog itself (or mine at least), its purpose is not to gain a large readership and make me a famous writer; it is there because I want to write it. So someone somewhere in the world decides he'd quite like to be able to post to his blog from his fridge (so he can write about what he's having for dinner) and if he's got the time and inclination, the fridge-blog software is there for all to use. This really is one of the joys of free software, and it's heartening to see just how many of the popular blogging tools are released under the GPL. But fragmentation has long been the bane of many otherwise excellent software projects in the free software world. Those who contribute do so by and large because they want to, not because they hope their work will get noticed and they'll get offered a job with Microsoft. So they do it how they think it should be done.

So, in a world where it's easy to make things yourself, things get made. And when people share their home-made things, there are lots of things available - especially when they're virtually free to distribute. What a wonderfully nice world we live in. It's a shame we can't apply the same theory to gas really. Now I'm an advocate of localism and microgeneration of electricity, but I think I'd draw the line at the local village having its own bore-hole staffed by the old guy who's retired and likes to keep occupied. Better instead to reduce usage, methinks. It seems that gas users everywhere will have to content themselves to making do with those options provided to them by the relevant authority - in this case the gas company.

So, choose quarterly electronic billing and have them plant a tree for you, choose direct debit with £2 per month discount, choose a pre-payment card. Better still, buy a large gas company. If you can't do that though, just be glad that from all the payment options you never knew you might want, there's one to suit you.