New Year, New Direction

When I started Bugged Out in January 2006, it was because I saw almost no sites or blogs that focused on New Yorkers who were suffering from bed bug infestations. Most of what I saw was advice for people to throw a fumigation tent over their detached homes. I saw a void, and when I saw no one else filling it, I decided to do it myself.

But that was then, and this is now. There are many blogs about bed bugs and New York City, Bugged Out kind of gets lost in the crowd. There are a lot of great New York-centric bed bug blogs out there, and most of them have more specific missions that just being an online community for New Yorkers living with bed bugs. And they do a way better job of fulfilling those goals than I ever could.

I could commit a lot of time and energy to making Bugged Out about covering bed bug-related legislative policy in cities whose leaders are actually accountable to their constituents or picking out bed bug headlines in the media or chronicling my own personal hardships with bed bugs, things that are already being accomplished elsewhere on the Web. I could just retire Bugged Out and declare it obsolete, leaving it as an archive for readers to browse and only regard as a dead, stagnant tombstone to a blog that once was.

Or I can take Bugged Out in a completely new direction by doing the same thing I did three years ago: do something I didn't already see being done.

Wow, I just unintentionally used the verb do in four different tenses in the same sentence.

But let me get back to the point.

Starting January 15...new look, new mission statement, new direction.

New Bugged Out.

Happy New Year.