Why I Blog

My cousin Marilyn did a tribute to blogging last week, and I'm borrowing her logo graphic for this post. I've written several times about how many great things I've experienced through blogging, the greatest of which is all the family members I'm growing close to after way too many years of no real communication. I've been there... No sense going there again right now!

But what I have been thinking about, that I haven't really talked about before, is why I like blogging better than the other social web stuff that's always coming and going.

For example: I had a myspace account for about 30 minutes. Hated hanging out there so much that I cancelled it less than an hour after creating it. There were several things I hated about it - for one thing, there seemed to be an overall feeling of "ick" to it. Like hanging out at WalMart. Or worse. And then there is the fact that myspace and its addicts have gone a long way to kill the web with painfully bad visual design. A fair amount of that has crept into the blog world too... When I go to a blog that has a really busy layout, say a static picture that's not toned down at all, and then has text floating above it, that's just barely two shades lighter or darker than the prevailing color of the background, and you have to scroll the text up and down to get it to stay over the parts of the background that you can actually see it against... It's pretty close to seizure inducing - certainly maddening, and bad enough that I excused myself from that party a couple years ago, when the 'space was at the peak of its popularity.

These days, the big big thing is Twitter. I don't have nearly as many reasons to explain why I'm not Twitterpated, but it really just boils down to a "so what" attitude. I really haven't ever said to myself "I wish I could let anyone and everyone know what I'm doing minute to minute."

If you're not familiar with the Twitter, it's like text messaging for the web. Messages have a really small size limit, and its claim to fame is that it's so easy and quick to let people know what you're up to, that you can update it for every little mundane thing. Being the "IT!" application right now, there are many people who literally live on it. While I've never created my own account, I've seen several other people's Twitter feeds highlighted - and sometimes ridiculed - on other blogs or sites. None of those have made me want to sign up and join the TwitterNation. No bad blood to those who do - it just gets a big "meh" from me.

A couple years ago I wrote about how irritating classmates.com is to deal with. For years, they had the "what ever happened to that guy I went to school with" market cornered, and despite the huge amounts of advertising interspersed within all the lists of possible classmates, they also charge what always seemed to me to be ridiculous fees to actually communicate with any long lost friends. I did get re-acquainted with my high school best friend Scott through there, but I'm pretty sure we would have gotten in touch by now anyway, thanks to the other current big thing, that often runs hand-in-hand with Twitter.

I'm talking, of course, about Facebook.

I first created a Facebook account several years ago. I never actually went there, or used it for anything, but a friend had invited me, and since I'd never heard of it at the time, I signed up to see what it was all about.

In the years since, it's grown and grown, and now just about everyone in the world is on Facebook. (obviously exaggerating here, but not by too much) My aforementioned friend Scott and I keep in tough through Facebook, which is good because I will certainly never give classmates another thin dime of my money. Why would I, when virtually everyone I went to school with is on Facebook for free?

So Facebook has some pretty great things going for it...

So why don't I like it?

I know that a couple months ago, several of my blogging cousins and friends started dipping their toes into the Facebook waters, and it was abruptly stopped by a well timed email virus that did a fair amount of damage to their systems. While I'm willing to bet that the offending email and virus didn't actually come from FB, it did enough PR damage to scare them off.

But that's not what I don't like about it.

What I don't like about Facebook, is that it's too much like a Super-Sized Twitter, which also has the benefits of being able to post pictures, videos and other things you like to share. Most people link their Twitter account to their Facebook, so that their seemingly insignificant "What Am I Doing Right Now?" feed is published in both places for even more to see.

But if that's all it was, I wouldn't mind. Sometimes it's fun to know that Rob is worshipping his iphone again, or that Glen is suffering with 100 degree heat at 9:00 in the morning. And there's no denying that it's kind of exciting to get an alert that someone from high school, whose name you haven't heard for years, stumbled upon you and wants to be Facebook Friends. Of all the aspects of FB, that's the one that has most captured my interest, and kept me coming back.

But...

Once re-connected with people that I haven't seen in over 20 years, and who - and this applies to the vast majority of them - I really never had anything in common with anyway, other than that our parents bought houses in the same community, and we probably liked some of the same music, but I tend to think there's a reason we didn't stay in touch after graduation... Anyway, once re-connected with these people, your Facebook news feed quickly fills up with not only their usually innocuous status updates, but also what I call app-spam, updates from the hundreds of applications running on the site.

So while scanning down to see cool tidbits like Rachel having an exciting countdown of some sort, I have to sift through 25 different announcements that:

[NAME YOU VAGUELY RECOGNIZE] Has Just Moved Up A Level In Mob Wars!!

OH. MY. GOSH. There is NO WAY I could have gone through this day without knowing that.

BUT WAIT, THERE'S MORE!!

[ANOTHER NAME OF SOME PERSON] Has Sent You A Piece Of Flair!!

Well, it's a GOOD THING that I took my thyroid medicine this morning, otherwise I wouldn't be able to keep up with the excitement of GETTING SOME FLAIR!!

Wow.

Luckily, you can adjust the "newsfeed" to show more or less of the types of things you do or don't want to see. I've done that. It's quited things down a lot. And you know what I've found?

I can go three or four days without checking in, and when I do again, the items that were most recent at my last check, are only maybe a quarter of the way down the page. If I had all the "OH WOW, SOMEBODY IS GOING ON ANOTHER DRAGON QUEST!" noise pouring in, it would be the other way around. It's amazing how high the noise-to-signal ratio is.

I do check in once every day or two, because like I said, there are a lot of people there that I don't see anywhere else, and they occasionally have something worthwhile going on, like Glen's heatwave. And I have my blog imported to my FB, which works out well because that's where Scott (high school best friend) reads it, and comments on it, and we converse back and forth.

But it amazes me that through its premise of bite-sized chunks of info, FB has lulled the masses into thinking they have time to hang out there. After all, you rarely see more than two lines of text from any one person at any given time. But I think people would be, and ultimately will be amazed when they suddenly realize how much time they're devoting to what is 95% utter nonsense.

Getting back to the title of this post...

I blog because I can put several thoughts together, and occasionally go on rants like this. I then share my multiple thoughts with other people who also enjoy non-bite-sized chunks of info - people who also write down full length thoughts, which I enjoy reading. It's a pretty cool thing!

Plus, there are several companies out there who will take your blog and publish it into a keepsake book, a real journal of your life, which will last beyond the craze of online publishing, or Twittering, or texting... Something you can put in a time capsule for your children and/or grandchildren. Something real.

Holy Crap, I sound OLD!!

Over the past few months, I've realized that despite the other options out there, this blogging thing is cool, and is what I like to do.

Thank you Marilyn, for inspiring me to take a closer look at it.

Oh, and Marilyn has a brother, my cousin Mitch. He's not one to ever let a mockable moment go by, so this week he paid tribute to his sister's previous week's blog-love-fest with his own modified logo...



It was cool last week. And it's cool this week, and I'm guessing it'll still be cool next week.