For some years I have been describing myself as a career schizophrenic. Since leaving my job as editor of PC Pro magazine in early 2004, I have pulled together an increasingly disparate range of activities to make a living, which in their turn have pulled me in many directions at once. Whilst remaining a prolific technology journalist – dubbed the Whore of the Tech Industry by Wil Harris, one of the founders of ChannelFlip – I have published a novel after many years of gestation, finished off a PhD and rewritten the dissertation as a book, and engaged increasingly in education, culminating in taking the role of Subject Leader in a bleeding-edge Web course at Ravensbourne. I have created a video production company which shot and edited over 750 product review videos for TrustedReviews, and now produces promotional videos for the likes of IBM. For the last 18 months I have been playing music with a loose collective that is now releasing an album’s worth of tracks.

At times it has been a bit like simultaneously juggling an armchair, a Bengal tiger, and a roaring chainsaw, and occasionally I do long for the simplicity of a regular day job again. There has been a recurring theme, however. The development that was clearly going to be the nemesis of the magazine industry when I left it in 2004 was the rise of the Internet, and all of my activities since leaving PC Pro (as well as before I even joined it) have revolved around the Web. It was the arrival of digital technology and the ability of the Internet to distribute content in a new way that led me to the tech industry in the first place as a journalist. The Web has always been the dark shadow lurking in the background, the most ground-breaking technology of the second half of the 20th Century. So Webmediology.com finally brings together all the myriad activities I engage in around this central theme, and hopefully means my career as a self-imposed schizophrenic is finding some level of psychological unity.