Saturday, September 13, 2008

Why a public Blog, and what the future holds

Hi all!

I honestly forgot I even had signed up for Blogger until I went to post a comment today on a friend's blog. Then I remembered.

I signed up because I HAD to. It was about the time of the very public tussle (at least in the Tech World) between Andrew Baron and Amanda Congdon of Rocketboom. You remember that, don't you? Oh, you don't? Basically, Rocketboom was one of the first lasting vlogs (video blogs) on the Web. Many nasty public comments were made and it wasn't really clear who was right. Congdon started her own blog about it, and I wanted to comment. At the time Blogger didn't allow anonymous comments so I had to sign up. Anyway, that was the last time I visiting Blogger, and it wasn't more than something along the lines of "I'm creating this because I have to."

I used to run a blog for my hockey team back in the 1990s. This was before it was called blogging, and it wasn't as common to blog as sliced bread. I wrote that one for several years before my attention got distracted by my parents and grandmother getting sick. Never picked it back up after that.

When I joined MySpace a year, or so, ago, there was a blogging component. I did a few blogs, but still not a lot. Not sure why. Other friends, on the other hand, are self proclaimed blogging junkies.

The question is why do people blog? For a lots of people its therapeutic. For some they want to be heard. For some they are terribly introverted and putting it on "paper" is their way of being extroverted. Which am I? None of them; all of them; some portion of them mixed up? I can't even answer that one myself. If you blog, which are you?

People used to keep diaries in book form; hiding them for nobody to find. Probably the most famous was The Diary of Anne Frank. Then there were those that weren't called diaries, but had the fancy name of memoirs. These were from people that wanted to know their thoughts would be available for future generations. An example that comes to mind are the books Ronald Reagan kept. While I have not read them in whole, it's amazing to look at them and see how the handwriting style changed during the years in The Whitehouse as he began to get sick. That's one thing we miss from blogging. Its all in pretty fonts, and doesn't look as personal as personal handwriting. But then again, if this was in my handwriting you wouldn't be able to read it.

Diaries were such a fad 25 years ago that someone was able to create a major hoax of the Hitler Diaries, which cost the German Magazine Stern a whole boat-load of money. These were supposed to give us a new look at the former German leader and make him potentially viewed in a whole new light. Ignoring what may, or may not, have been the author's motives, it was accepted, albeit for a short bit of time, as real since it was in diary form and "found" in some barn somewhere.

The conversion from diaries to blogging was a logical one. It's a hassle to have to trot out a book, then write. My hand cramps up after a short period of time when trying to write. And, though never a work of art, my script was never all that legible, even to myself. And what if you want to change something? A major pain! Now that we have the age of computers. It's as easy as firing up the computer, opening the text editor of choice, and writing down your thoughts. But the big explosion came with websites like Blogger and Wordpress. Before you had to know a bit about web publishing. Now you don't. Just log in and post your thoughts.

And I'm going to predict we're still near the tip of the Iceberg. How about just speaking into your cell phone and your blog is updated? There's a new service called Jott which allows you to make a phone call. Jott's computers then transcribe your spoken word to text and update your blog! It was free up until the first part of this month. Now there's a cost for all but the most basic service. Still, it's amazing to see it work. I've been using it to update my Twitter status, which then updates my Facebook status (YES, I'm a bit of a tech junkie). Of the 20, or so, Jotts I've done, all but one have been 100% accurate. Just a short bit of time from now it won't be all that uncommon to speak a command to your phone, ala the reoccurring line from Star Trek, “...Captain's Log, Star Date 4915. Today we traveled to...”.

Anyway, that's all till next time (sometime this Decade I hope). Another blog about nothing really; but more than the last time.