After doing a fair amount of reading of other people’s blogs in the past few days, a few thoughts occur to me.
The first is that people blog for a variety of different reasons. Yes, it has become immensely popular in the past year (give or take), and that, with that growth, we’ve seen people use this medium for a variety of purposes. However, I think the same 2 or 3 reasons come back again and again in each case. It is no secret among my friends that I do hold a certain level of disdain for one of those three types, but I’ll try to be as gentle as my belligerence will allow.

Type 1 is new for me, and I mention them first for … well, no reason at all. These are the folks that, I believe, have discovered (perhaps even after only having been Type 2 bloggers for some time), that this medium is a mechanism to entertain a readership with the trials and travails of some particular facet of life. Whether that is the challenges faced in a particular job, with a particular person or just their general views on life, politics, religion or some equally vital topic, its principle purposes has drifted from Type 2’s simple venting to something much more public and perhaps even less personal.

Type 2, I think, is where most people fall in. They see the medium, the see the nature of it, and its ability to act as a sort of ‘personal record’ for themselves, and whether they ever attract any readership outside of their personal cluster of friends is pretty much irrelevant. It is as much about personal record’s keeping and storage of ‘moment-in-time’ feelings as it is about communicating with any particular social group. They aren’t generally advertised anywhere, and only ever referred to direct friends/relatives to particular thoughts or records of events. I would also say that there is some element in here of being able to ‘vent’ somewhat anonymously to the world, but I would also not say this is the primary purpose. This is also where I consider myself to be (at the moment).

Type 3 is where I find the most to complain about, and … although admittedly at the origins of the more ‘evolved’ forms of blogs we see today, the ‘livejournal’ style blogs are still out there in force. Here’s where I need to restrain myself from being caustic. First, I’ll say that I have perfectly sane friends who still does use the mechanisms of a livejournal (or similar) site to record their feelings/sentiments and such, and are generally more of the Type 2 folks above. I hold no ill will against them at all, for all the reasons I’d mentioned above. The people I do take issue with are the ones that use the medium to find someone, anyone, in fact, that will listen to their whining, self-piteous emotion-filled postings. They crave the comments, and reply to them immediately, finding their only redemption and self worth in their ‘buddy list’ and how many ‘communities’ they can belong to. Every blog-friend, to them, is a piece of online currency to be bartered and traded for emotional well being.

Please.

The only solace I take is that I can filter this from my daily life very easily. I think I actually link to one LJ site, and only because I know the person is Type 2, and not dependent at all on anyone replying to his postings to satisfy some insane desire to be loved, understood or otherwise accepted into society. He stands very firma on our terra without such things.

And my final thoughts drifted into whether or not I could achieve something of the Type 1 variety myself. I think I need to ponder that further. I think it requires several things to be true:

  • You need to be literate. You need to use complete sentences, and spellcheck your work. You need to be able to express yourself well.
  • You need to have sufficient access to keep posting on a regular basis, keeping content fresh, and readers interested.
  • You need to have something interesting to say/post about

So… I think I can muster the required elements for the first bullet. My brain does builtin spell checking, and I’d call my grammar passable if not good. My vocabulary tends to be better than most, albeit living in Colorado has thrown me back a bit, leaving me prone to speech/word patterns that I generally find deplorable. Hopefully the written word wouldn’t suffer much for that.

The second point is the toughest, I think. Access is fine. I have my own servers, and can maintain the technology necessary to keep the ship up and running. The time commitment is, perhaps, the hardest thing. It really would be something you’d have to devote time to just about every day.

The third part. Hmm. Thats pretty subjective, I think. At first, I consider that my life has been, in general, fairly uninteresting and without much to talk about or rant about, even. On the other hand, I have alot of good stories. They aren’t focused on any particular topic, except maybe focused around the fact that I’m a geek, live a geeky life, do geeky things and have learned lots of geeky lessons along the way. There’s a market, sure. Finally, the Internet is goddamn big place. There are SO MANY FREAKING PEOPLE out there that you’d have to think that no matter how ‘niche’ you are, there’s got to be a whole crowd of them that are interested in what I have to say.

So, I’ll think about that some more. Maybe I’ll just start recording those stories in here anyway, reverting to my typical ‘Type 2’ behavior, and if somehow the breadth of the readership expands beyond my general circle of friends, so be it. Need to think about it s’more.

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