Egoism is my notion of what a personal website should be: not a blog, but a variant on the mind map -- a cluster of facts and ideas, interwoven and displayed in a host of possible fashions.

I've never liked the strongly chronological focus of the blog; my ideas splinter, change, and meld on a regular basis, and I'd rather have the focus be on what rather than when. Put another way, I don't care what I thought about a given subject 10 years ago; I care about what I think about it today. If a visitor cares about my thoughts on subject X, I'd rather have one cohesive page for them on X rather than a dozen scattered blog entries with inconsistent positions.

I also dislike how particular items get lost in the standard blog -- URLs, references to media, etc. These should be held in a database as first-order objects, while retaining the ease of a throwaway reference. That brings in Rhetoric, my attempt at a lightweight markup; Rhetoric was born out of my dissatisfaction with existing markup options. I wanted something that did a superior job of handling all of the potential uses one might have -- wikis, blog posts, code documentation, academic writing, and everyday note-taking.