caption id=”attachment_278″ align=”alignleft” width=”250″ caption=”My Crocs”]/caption]Crocs. They came out in 2002. And soon these funny looking shoes were everywhere. And, if you’re like me, you thought, “I don’t get it.” These things are ugly. They’re a fashion nightmare. They look stupid. And Dutch. And uncomfortable. And yet…

Crocs craze spread like crazy. Even the President of the United States was photographed wearing them. The Crocs people built factories and sold millions. Maybe billions. Maybe… trillions. They were everywhere.

My brother-in-law got some. And he’s a really cool dude. And then my other brother-in-law got some. And he’s a really cool dude. So I asked for an explanation.

“They’re comfortable, and they never wear out.” Pragmatic.

Somewhere in the back of my not-so-fashionable mind, I started wanting some. I rationalized, “A bad fashion sense has never stopped me before, so what have I to loose?”

I looked at the beach one day. A store in Seaside had Crocs. Kids Crocks. Pink Crocs. Small Crocks. Orange Crocs. But nothing I could ever wear. Seriously, it’s hard enough to put on plastic clogs already. I needed the men’s-dress-shoe-brown, in my size, period. Nothing else would work.

So my wife orders some for Christmas. For my brother-in-law. Who already has a pair. Did she miss my hints? Was she not standing right next to me at Crocs-R-Us in Seaside? So when it turned out they were a size too small for him, I asked him what size he wore. They were my size. So we quickly ordered him a new pair online, and I took possession of my shiny new Crocs.

Not exactly groundbreaking

To say I was late to the game would be an understatement. I got my crocs in Christmas of 2008. For most, the novelty had worn off. Instead of people thinking you were maybe a little cool for being secure enough in your self-image to wear something so dorky looking, now I was looked upon with scorn, derision, and pity. The fad had passed. The stock price reflected it, too. The price per share was $74.75 in October of 2007 . It plummeted to $1.20 in January of 2009. Ouch.

So this is my first blog post?

So yeah, speaking of crocs… I was in a meeting a couple of months ago. Our Worship Design Team was doing some long-range planning. My Sr. Pastor talked about using his blog to better connect with the congregation during an upcoming series. But then he caught himself. He uses Facebook a lot more now, and likes the immediate and interactive feedback it provides. He asked our group, “Do people still blog? Or is it being replaced with Twitter and Facebook?”

Silly question, I thought. And then I saw everyone’s hesitant faces. “A blog certainly has its place,” Andrew Conard replied. But his question haunted me. I’m tech-savvy. I like to communicate. I’m just narcissistic enough to think people may care about what I have to say. Could it be possible that I could miss an entire medium? That I’d just start Tweeting one day and reduce my brilliance to 140 character sound bites? Perish the thought! I must blog!

So yeah, I’m late to the party. And the above story isn’t really a reflection of my motivation for blogging. But it honestly did make me wonder why I had waited so long, and it lit a bit of a fire under me to get going.

I’ve also realized I’m lacking what some might call a “unified web presence”. I’ve worked full-time for three different ministries now, and done lots of corporate and freelance work. But there was no one place that was a hub, bringing all my varied stuff together in one place. So instead of just a blog, I’m building a personal identity website. If you poke around here, you’ll see that it’s nowhere near ready. I’ve spent days customizing a WordPress theme and working out lots of back-end issues for how I want this to work. But come back in a week or two, and I’ll be populating my site with lots more stuff. I just figured it was more important to start writing than to wait until the framework was completely fleshed out.

The Hope

I hope blogging isn’t dead. And if it is, then I pledge to single handedly breathe new life into the medium. There’s a reason people call me World Wide Webster.*

By the way, Crocs latest earning statements came out this month.

NEW YORK (TheStreet) – Crocs(CROX) swung to profit in its first-quarter and issued second-quarter guidance that topped estimates. During the quarter the company earned $5.7 million, or 7 cents a share, compared with a loss of $22.4 million, or 27 cents, in the year-ago period. Analysts expected a smaller gain of 2 cent a share.

Thanks, Crocs. Now there’s hope for belated bloggers everywhere.

*No one calls me World Wide Webster