Why blog?

My friend Steve said a little while ago that I’m always ranting on my blog. Of course I am. That’s what blogs are for. The blog was probably invented by someone who was really steamed up about something at three in the morning and didn’t have anyone to talk to. In the world of the blog, everything is important, your opinion matters, and you have your own small soapbox to shout about whatever you like without fear of interruption or a rotten tomato in the face. People who have a bookmark to your blog, or if they’re really clever, are subscribed via your feed, come by once in a while and leave comments. It’s even more exciting when someone leaves a comment after they found you randomly through a search engine – it must mean your blog is really out there on the Internet, it has a presence, you’re not just shouting at a brick wall.

Comments that agree with what you’ve written about or say good things make you feel better, give you a quick fix of approval and validation. Comments from reasonable people who disagree with what you say are a great excuse to compose another diatribe in response to theirs, you know, really have a worthwhile discussion, even if it is about whether Mars Bars are smaller than they used to be or not. Comments that are spelt badly, written in capitals, question your parentage and compare you to someone’s genitalia can be dismissed as the rantings of a lonely madman who likes sour milk and pulls the wings off insects for fun.

The people who leave that last kind of comment tend to stick to safe ground as far as insults go - your average American who wants to insult someone from England will more often than not call them something like a ‘tea-sipping, yellow-toothed pansy’ and pass some remark about how we’d all be speaking German by now if it wasn’t for them. When the Guardian orchestrated an e-mail campaign to get the British public to write to undecided American voters in the last US presidential election, dissuading them from voting for Bush, more replies than anything questioned the quality of the recipient’s dental hygiene. In the enlightened world of the Internet, stereotypes are alive and well.

Blogs do an important job. Quite aside from the blogs written by underground activists in repressive states or high-class London call girls, and the social commentary that they have to make, quite apart from the ever-increasing, publicly available record of the lives of millions of people (dull as they may be), blogs quite simply make up for the fact that most people can’t express themselves as effectively in ‘real life’ as they can when they have the time to write it down. How many people have an argument or discussion with someone, and an hour after it ended they’re muttering to themselves what they should have said? How many people simply don’t have any other way to say what they’d like to because it’s uncool, or they’ll be interrupted by someone with a louder voice? How many people just need the time to think about what they think, and to express it in a way they can be happy with? You can edit a blog – you can’t edit a conversation.

Maybe blogs allow people to become lazy with their real life interactions, maybe blogs are a symptom of a society that is becoming increasingly individualistic and closed-down – but maybe blogs are just allowing people to express themselves as effectively as they’d always hoped they could. Blogging is the closest thing there is to traditional diary-keeping, in a modern format. People can obviously write about their lives in private documents, but they do it on a blog because it’s easy, it’s free, and because maybe someone else will read what they’ve written, maybe comment on it, and therefore make it matter. Every so often you find a blog written by a complete stranger that turns out to be funny, wise and true, and it’s enough to remind you that the loonies haven’t taken over the asylum just yet.

Blogs have become ever more clever in the last few years – they can now tell you what music people have been listening to, what pictures they’ve been taking, what books and web sites they’ve been reading. Blogs can automatically ‘ping’ other blogs to tell them that they’ve linked to an interesting page, creating social contact without any effort on the part of the author. The importance of blogs is increasingly being recognised by business and the media, and blog writers are employing an arsenal of tools to improve their profile, their ranking amongst other blogs, and the income they can make through advertising. The future of blogging looks assured.

Favourites and friends:

• Dough Diary – friend and fellow singleton muses on food and football
• The Answer’s 42 / Dead Interesting – mum’s blog and perspectives on death
• Amy Allcock – Flickr contact, creative, interesting stuff
• Boing Boing – lots of links and time-wasters
• Lifehacker – how tos, ‘life hacks’
• Tales of Asia – travel in South East Asia
• Noodlepie – Asian food
• Indieish – great free music

Any other recommendations?

If you don’t have a blog, free blog providers include:

• Blogger
• WordPress