On Blogging

*yawn*

When I ask people if they blog, and they reply in the negative, the most common reason I am given is that they think there is really nothing interesting in their lives to write about. This is a statement that never fails me to make me feel chastened, the discovery of my friends' humble and honest self-reflections about their watered-down lives against my own sluttish (?) display to the world of the extravagences of my shallow existence, an existence that includes taking self-indulgent photographs of myself as such:

(Hair is growing out at a fine rate - I can shampoo now. For those of you who have never experienced a buzzcut, 3mm hair cannot be shampooed. It just runs off your head like muddy precipitate. Only at around 9mm does hair begin to retain hair-improvement formula.)

If it were true that only people who led interesting lives should be allowed to blog, I think Blogger would find itself in a state of rather less business than it has now. The reality, of course, is that the majority of bloggers write about nothing more than the most trivial affairs of their lives, such as top-rated dooce, a not-so-desperate housewife and one of my daily(well, almost) reads. But on the other end of the spectrum there are the politically charged ones that begin with nice, analytical articles about this-or-that government's tyrannical or oppresive regimes and then degenerate into comments from viewers that sound suspiciously like they came from an eighteen-year-old.

Then they're the people who have blogs describing their latest twenty favourite links, like this, this and this. The people who've been in the business longer know to include some descriptions of the outbound links (in my case, an online etext by Charles MacKay "Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds", a computer-animation with some beautiful music and the last being a really cool project by students of MIT about a disco dance floor), but sometimes you get people who just provide anonymous surprise links of the day, which I have no doubt takes it roots from the days when their loving parents would bring home mysterious presents for them (which they so lovingly share with us now). I have tried setting up daily fun-links myself, but after a while I realized my blog was neither specialized enough to provide entertainment of this scale nor were my surfing interests popular ones with my readers (I used to track where you come from and where you go to after reading my blog). So I stopped, though from time to time I promise to post the occasional fun stuff (and less etexts). As for people who suffer from the chronic need to share their surf-habits, I blame entirely on the email-culture of the IT era, where if you received attention of any kind the standard procedure was to forward it to someone else as soon as possible.

I've seen blogs dealing entirely with food and packed with recipes and blogs that were created to commemorate some classes' comments about their imminent graduation. I've seen blogs used as bug-trackers and administrative-complaint-loggers. Blogs are used for advertisement, for spreading of news, for influencing public opinion - in essence blogging has become our new pen-and-paper, the poster of the new millenium, the face of the written word for the century.

So! Write now!