We had our second child five months ago. Anyone with a baby knows you spend a lot of time sitting still, doing nothing but holding said baby. You watch a bit more TV than you used to, or read if you're able. It was at this time that my mom and step-dad loaned me the complete DVD set of the old television show, Kung Fu.

You remember this show, right? On the air in 1972-75, David Carradine walking through the Old West as the half-occidental monk Kwai Chang Caine? Barefoot and kicking butt? Learning and loving and righting wrongs, all between flashbacks of his days in the Shaolin monastery at the feet (and fists) of Master Po and Master Kan? I love kung fu movies, and as a kid I loved this show. I hadn't seen it in years and was eager to learn if it was as good as I remembered. Baby asleep on chest, I slipped the first DVD into the player after my older child and wife had gone to bed. The show WAS as good as I remembered. No, it was BETTER.

I went on with my life. I gleefully continued working my way through the series after everyone went to bed and I lay on the couch with our infant. I talked with my parents about it — I talked with everyone about it. I felt the show was deep, out of its time, a literary and cultural milestone in pop culture history. But nobody in my immediate circle was really watching it that way. My folks liked it, sure, and we chatted about it, but nobody wanted to sit down and discuss it with me the length and breadth of which I wanted. Not that I would have had time for such a discussion, anyway!

So then it hit me: this is how blogs get started, precisely because you have something to say and want to say so in a lasting way, to leave your mark in the form of the written word, to give voice for your feelings and have some reaction in return. One night after the kids were asleep and I was doing some work on our home computer, I whimsically fired up blogger.com. I started a blog about the experience of watching Kung Fu, figuring I would try it for a while and abandon it if I couldn't keep up with it. KwaiChangCaine.blogspot.com was born.

Building the site took maybe a half hour. I slapped up a few links, made a blogroll, and wrote my first post. I sat at my desk in the dark and stared at the computer. Suddenly, I was one of them. Suddenly, I had joined the conversation. Perhaps because the Internet moves at nearly the speed of thought, I expected some kind of instant feedback, a celebration, perhaps a lone comment at 1 a.m.: "Great new site! I think I speak for all kung fu and daddy bloggers when I say we are looking forward to more content from you!"

Of course, nothing happened.

Nothing happened when I looked at the blog again a few days later. I e-mailed a few other "Kung Fu" web sites to let them know about my blog. One of them added it to his resources page. I wrote a few more posts. Nothing much happened.

If the blog were a bigger outlet for me, I certainly would have done more to promote it, to network with like bloggers, exchange links, send pings, stuff like that. But because it was an experiment, I have let it whither. The most important thing for me, though, was that it let me get inside the skin of a blogger a little. I spend a lot of time communicating to bloggers on behalf of our clients without ever being one of them. Now, I think I have a better idea of what it's like to be on the other side of the keyboard.

• 1. Blogs get started because somebody has something to say, whether it is about the everyday, the huge, the personal, the universal, the eclectic or a combination of things. The theme to my blog could have morphed into "stuff I watch on TV while the baby sleeps on me."


• 2. Blogging is lonely, or can be. Certainly, some bloggers want no contact from PR firms and the like. They want to be left alone. But even those bloggers are part of a network of similar bloggers; they have friends. Except when we stuff a half-completed rough draft into a desk drawer, nobody wants to write something that no one will read. Blogs communicate.


• 3. Blogs want new readers and they welcome the overtures — if polite — of companies like ours. As a Kung Fu blogger I certainly would welcome, say, a nice note from the makers of the DVD set, info about other, related products such as books and movies, an invitation to collaborate on TV-related promotions. I would pass on news about David Carradine or a new coffee-table book on the show — especially if I got a copy of the coffee-table book on the show!

This isn't the time to rehash the already well-covered dos and don'ts of blog-based PR but it is a reminder that blogs are fertile ground for companies that want to respect them and empower them. Our own work, which involves dozens of bloggers with whom we regularly communicate and a handful that are on a respectful "do not pitch" list, attests to this.

So, uh, please read my kung fu blog, ok? Kidding!