Sat, 04 Oct 2003

The Blogoshpere

I've put my commentary below the link this time - it's so lengthy that that's where it seemed to belong.

'Blogosphere' to reach 10 million, almost all dead - report. Teenage kicks [The Register]

I get the distinct impression that The Register doesn't like blogs... hmmm, I wonder what that could mean? This vitrolic piece by some low-paid, attack dog flunky (how's that for purple, Register-style prose?) did get me to thinking, however, about what this blog is, and why I do it.

For the record, I am not a teenage girl, my blog has lasted (so far) 10 months, and I have no plans to stop blogging.

I don't do $500/head conferences, not with uber-bloggers or presidential condidates.

I am an HTML coder - as well as C++, varieties of assembler, Object Pascal, BASIC, and, ye gads, even some COBOL.... but none of those have anything to do with my blogging, other than being occassional subjects.

I don't necessarily do this for fun, but I'm not so deadly serious that I'd stop if I thought nobody was reading it.

This is not my diary - there's some "personal" stuff in here, but not much. If I wanted a "diary" blog I'd adopt a "nom de plume" and go from there.

Some of my friends read this blog, but most of my readers are folks I've never met. I know this from the logs and comments. Some of my readers have become cyber-friends, so this blog has been a connection point - that was not anticipated last January when I began messing around with Radio.

I started this blog out of a fascination with RSS, but it quickly grew well beyond that.

It really is a medium for self-expression - a way for the "average" person to record running comments and impressions on events of the day. It's a way to put my life into context.

As something of amateur historian/genealogist this kind of information will be invaluable to researchers in a hundred years. Assuming, of course, that it survives. Would that my great-grandmother had kept a blog!

Blogs have the potential to be for the 21st century what Pepy's Diary became to the 17th. - a goldmine of the mundane, a treasure trove of the ordinary, a hoarde of the opinions of John and Jane Doe.

One of the ways in which an Asatrurar attempts to achieve a modicium of immortality is by being remembered. Writings such as those appearing here attempt to insure this rememberance, while passing on something of the personality of the writer.

Blogs will eventually will pass the ten million mark - and it won't matter if most of them are dead. In fact, to some extent, that's the point....

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