I’ve added the words “keyboard confessional” to my blog title, because that’s what I thought it was for a while. This is where I come to write things that I want to share… things that have happened, things that I’ve done… But, how much of a confessional is a blog? Do I feel comfortable enough to share everything here? Could I write things that I’m not proud of in here? There is no ethical code governing blog to blogger confidentiality. A blog is not like a diary. A diary is something you have hidden under your mattress, with a tiny brass clasp around it, secured by a useless little key. A diary is something sacred, private, and forbidden to others. Your blog will share whatever you tell it with anyone who cares to read.
What got me thinking about all of this is the fact that I haven’t been writing a lot in my blog lately. I get like this when I feel like I don’t have anything to say. Whenever I’m away on vacation, I have plenty of things to say. Sometimes I feel like I have enough that I can write one or two entries per day. I’m amusing myself so much that I feel the need to share it.
But it’s not like nothing has been happening in my life right now. There have been plenty of things happening. It’s just that they seem routine. I guess I haven’t written them down because I don’t think that anyone would be interested in reading them. Realizing that, I started to wonder why I write in the first place. Is it for me, or is it for others? I mean, there is a select group of people who comment regularly here, and for that I am very grateful. I love blog comments even more than I love blogging.
If I felt that the commenters were the only ones who were reading, I could address my blog directly to them. Better yet, I could pick up a phone, or Skype, or open an MSN chat window and tell them directly. But, I know this is not the case. I know there are a lot more people who read this and never comment. More than once I’ve met up with a friend or casual acquaintence who has asked me what I’ve been up to, and I mention a trip or a show or something, and they say, “Oh yeah. I read about that in your blog.” That always throws me for a loop. What throws me on an even bigger loop is a look at the stats for this blog. I just started collecting stats on it in August, so it isn’t all that accurate, but already I can see that I’m getting visitors from Turkey, Romania, Colombia, and Morrocco, for instance. I don’t personally know anyone from any of these places.
It’s no mystery how people found this blog. I have it linked from my signature on deviantART, and I’m sure quite a few people see that. Also, I forgot to enter it into the little robot.txt file that you put on your site when you don’t want search engines to index it. So, if anyone was searching for my blog in Google, or even just me in general, they’ll find it easily enough. What boggles me is why does anyone care?
Anyway, the net result of all of this thinking is that as much as I want to think I blog for myself, I’ve realized that I am writing for the benefit of other people. My blog is not a place where you will find “my innermost thoughts, my most intimate details” (thank you Depeche Mode). But, I promise to try to make it interesting and sometimes useful.
And now, I continue with what I’ve been procrastinating from, which I don’t even feel like doing, let alone blogging about.
Get those glasses shot yet bud?
Ya … blogs shouldn’t be ‘diaries’ … it’s gotten a few people into trouble when they’ve treated them as such. But thankfully the police also found the blogs and were able to do what they do about such things.
Personally, I like reading your blogs because you write so well … even if it’s about what you made for dinner one night 😉
I don’t read much on paper … hmm, type on paper, glue bindings, goldleaf pages … I dunno, seems kinda ANTI-21st century to me. LOL. But maybe it’s just that I don’t feel I have the time to offer myself to sit down with a good [or even bad] book nowadays. Your blogs are often short … not in words necessarily, but definately not 100+ pages of story building and character development 😉
SO keep it up … well, IF you are so inclined.
yup the glasses are all shot, and now i’m doing the photoshop work on them to clean the dust. i should have spent more time polishing them. i wish i had an assistant! haha
blogs are fun! they are different from a one to one conversation because even though you have a general idea of who will read it, you cant personalize it and because of that I sometimes find out things about you you havent mentioned before.. i cant think of an example.
for me its not just about having other read it. Sometimes I feel like blogging. I dont know what that means but thats’ what it feels like. Putting stuff into words often helps me think about things somehow. So much, in fact, that I sometimes catch myself thinking in blogs. see thats just insane.
the stats are crazy detailed. It would be cool to realy know. like, have a box jump out at you so everyone tells you how and why they got here. heh I know of stories of how blogs got people into trouble because they’re searchable…
just keep blogging, just keep blogging… hehe
hmmm it’s true that blogging causes thinking. i forgot about that. and yes, the stats are crazy detailed, but there’s an even higher level of detail that tells you what people were searching for in search engines when they found your site. it’s too bad that i’m too lazy to figure out how to turn this feature on because it might be interesting.
actually, i’m a bit afraid of what that would do to my disk space on the server. after two months on the new server, the logs from my portfolio site are up to 300MB and rapidly growing. 😐 if i added referrer data to that, i’m sure those logs would bury me! by comparison, my blog logs are at about 4MB. i guess my pictures are more popular than my words, which makes me think i picked the right line of work. 🙂
don’t worry. i don’t intend to stop blogging 🙂
Well I don’t blog so I don’t know. I write in a journal that no one reads and those that I want to know the intimate details I tell.
I keep the ‘online’ journal on dA but it’s rarely “really” personal. I just can’t expose that much of myself without being paranoid about it.
I’ve shared things with people I thought I could trust, innocent things and then had them repeated back to me by people I am not close to. I don’t handle that well, I couldn’t imagine doing it with a group of people I don’t know at all just viewing my life like an amusing reality tv show.
Meh, I’m on a whole different rant now 😛 Anyhow do what you do, it’s fun to read and comment when you go off on your own tangents but I don’t look for anything personal here more a calendar of events of amusing tidbits so I can keep up with the day to day as we both have lives that go extremely fast and furious at the best of times and I like to be in touch in some respect. That’s why I read and that’s why I comment, so you remember that in the background I’m still paying attention.
:hug:
… whatever you call it, I call it a momentary lapse in ALL reality (got the T-SHIRTS!!), it doesn’t really matter, blog is blog!! And people will read it, even if the comments are half-baked…you should see the reaction to my posts!! hehehe;)
Hey man, I know I’m really late commenting here…talk about procrastination…so many blogs…so little time!!
I read you all the time, I’m just REALLY bad with not commenting as much as I want to!!
I’ve been doing alot of thinking about my blog recently. There are alot of things I WANT to write about so badly, and to tell you honestly, I would love to have readers read it. But, Unfortunately, my family [read: mother in law] reads and I can’t share as much as I’d like to.
I am actually contemplating starting another blog to facilitate my more edgy writing. I will give the addy to friends…but make sure the mother in law is not informed this time! LOL