Opinion - Blogging Part 1

To start off with, I must come clean with something. I missed it completely; when blog train sailed into the mainstream in 2004, I was not a passenger on it. Having observered and participated in several forum and chat communities by that point, I felt somewhat disillusioned with the bi-directional aspect of the Web and its unfavourable moron/non-moron ratio. To me, blogging seemed no more than a simpler, quicker mechanism for dumping info-sewage onto the internet.

While The Mew is my first foray into personal blogging, it's not my first piece of web real estate: years and years ago ('98, '99), I had a little free Geocities (later bought out by Yahoo) webspace and some sort of rudimentary page (I cannot remember anything apart from that it housed an MP3 of the first piece of music that I had written, and possibly creative writing from that time). Come to think of it, it's probably still up there somewhere, but I doubt that I shall ever find it again - but at least the message-in-a-bottle romanticism of the situation is there for me to enjoy. More recently, I started the Tallis development blog in order to improve communication within our "company", but that died off quickly after it became clear that the other Tallis members were not really interested. Nonetheless this failure allowed me to familiarise myself with the blog tools (and convince myself of their simplicity and flexibility).

I've since had a change of heart, which has allowed me to jump into the Mew with such vigour. Here is a list of things that I (now) believe blogs have going for them:

• Many underlying uses:
  
  • online diary
  • commentary/opinion
  • news aggregation
  • technical tutorials and insights
  • creative writing (McSweeney's is a prime example)


• Blogs have given people, who would otherwise not dare to dip their toes in the internet waters (such as musicians, celebrities and politicians), a new channel of communication with the outside world.


• Content and comment finally combined - an evolution from the previous webpage-forum separation. The structureless forum environment seemed to breed off-topic information pollution - something that the comment-story relationship seems to discourage.
  


• The community aspect - the comments (over which the blog owner has total control) and trackback system. I recently discovered that a friend from my Australia days maintains a blog; what surprised me was that while it was nothing much fancier than an online diary, almost every post was commented on by a group of about 5-6 people. As it turns out, she had once written some Harry Potter fanfiction and consequently, she was now part of a network of people who actively followed and interacted on each others' blogs.