Thoughts and Reflections on Blogging
I began blogging before the word had become part of the common vernacular. In the early days, people wrote about their day – their life. Online journals formed the basis of LiveJournal, DiaryLand, and Blogger. Any thoughts of blogs covering a niche or subject were years away. So too lifestreams – most people carried Nokia brick mobile phones, and connected once or twice a day to the internet via a screeching black box that trickled text onto the screen like a leaky tap.
People have become obsessed with traffic, search engine optimisation, and any number of other pointless escapades. Writing online has become the Emperor's New Clothes. Everyone has been brainwashed to believe that writing online should be short, snappy, direct, regular, and focussed. Forgive me for saying it, but that's a damn sausage machine, and all they're good at is churning out the same crap – again, and again – predictably.
Who wants to be predictable? Who wants to be the same?
I'm not entirely sure where I'm going with this – but perhaps that's the point. What you're reading is almost a direct transcript of my thoughts as they left my head, rolled through my fingers and appeared on the screen. The improvised stage play versus the edited movie.
I am reminded of the movie “Finding Forrester”, where the reclusive author sits his student down at a typewriter and instructs him to write. Not to think. Just to write. Write anything. It's a similar idea to NaNoWriMo, where quantity is valued over quality – while there will be a lot of garbage, there will also be brilliance.
Perhaps I do have a direction here.
By wrestling your way through the long, meandering streams of thought, you might get to know me a little better – or at least better than you might through a photo of a cat, a quote of a philosopher, or a transcribed conversation from a television show. And if you get to know me, we might actually become friends.