That is the question, or is it? Of course not! Every net savvy person worth his salt is blogging these days. You cannot but help jump in the bandwagon or risk being branded the dinosaur of internet "savvyness". In fact, I fear that I am already too late. However, in my defense I would like to state that I had intentions of blogging much earlier. I researched the question, "What is this blog thing anyway?" as early as January 2004 and in June 2004, I signed up for an account on Blogger and then for the next six months did nothing about it.
Back when webpages on tripod and geocities were cool, I did my best to put up a webpage to announce my presence on the internet (Warning: The page is ancient and the links do not work). As with 99% of the webpages out there, my webpage was devoid of any useful, interesting information. I searched high and low for applets with fancy animation showing "Welcome to my webpage", "This page is under construction" and "Email me". The only working link in the webpage was a narcissitic "I, Me, Myself..." page. I quickly lost interest in the webpage, because the fancy page hit counter steadily showed zero page hits. I hope my blogging does not die such a sad death.
Blogging, like personal webpages, presupposes that the publisher is interested in expressing his ideas to an audience who are willing to hear him/her out. Given the number of blogs these days, one cannot help but wonder, what did these people do before internet became commonplace? Did they suddenly discover the urge to jot down their thoughts and feelings? Or were they always looking for an outlet and discovered blogging? Or did they just change the medium through which they expressed themselves? As I see it, the real life equivalent of a blog is a personal diary. I myself have never kept a diary for the fear of people discovering the embarrassing secrets. Based on my blogging history since June 2004 (read zero posts), the real embarrassing discovery would have been that I did not have an interesting life worth jotting down on a diary. However, there is one problem with the diary-blog analogy. Back in the days of personal diaries, the entries were supposed to be personal. It was impolite to read someone's diary. With blogs, everything is published with the hopes that many will read it and the blog will be rated amongst the most popular ones. What has changed? How are the journal entries in a personal diary different from that in a blog? I suppose I will never know.
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I would think that blogging is playing to the Gallery; hoping that u connect with sufficient people. Whereas, writing in a diary is essentially more personal. But the fact still remains, that both of them are a journey of self-discovery. Whether you choose to hold up the mirror to yourself or let others do it for you, is simply your prerogative.
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