Posted on January 27, 2006 at 1:28 PM in thoughts
Note: The below is an archived entry from Earthling, formerly EarthLink's official blog. The blog itself has been decommissioned and is no longer updated, and comments are trackbacks are no longer accepted.
"Blog" is a charged word. I'm very pleased to be the first exposure that many EarthLink customers have to blogs. But because there's so much hype surrounding the word, I think many internet users are afraid of or turned off by the whole thing. I hear "I'm not a blog reader" or "I don't read the blogs" and I wonder what that really means.
Fundamentally, a blog is just a web site, no more, no less. Reading an entry on a blog does not suddenly make you a different person or smarter or more opinionated or funnier or hipper. It's just another search result in Google, just another choice for something to read. You don't quit reading other stuff. Reading something I write on Earthling doesn't suddenly make you "a blog reader." It just means you read something on Earthling.
One popular conception is that blogs are for ranting and raving and communicating extreme opinions to the masses. Over time, I'd like to highlight some of the other reasons blogs might end up being useful to you. Here's one:
Blogs get a lot of hype as a one-person-to-many-people communication, but they are also extremely useful as one-to-a-few communication. They are great for keeping in touch without too much effort. I've made many good friends at previous jobs. When I switch jobs and no longer have daily contact with those people, it becomes increasingly difficult to keep up with what's going on in their lives. It doesn't merit a daily phone call, and in fact, phone calls often fail, because sometimes what I'm after is hearing their monologue, not a dialogue. I want to know what they'd say if we were walking in to the office together, and they were giving me a run-down of what's important to them at that moment.
About a week ago a friend I used to work with started a blog on MySpace, and I've been reading it ever since. It's nice one-way communication with the option to make it two-way if the need arises. And I can tune out anything I'm not interested in -- I don't have to pretend to hang on every word. If I want to talk to him about something he wrote, I'll leave a comment, or give him a telephone call. The options for communication feel more balanced this way.
In researching this entry, I did a search for what bloggers had written about "Why Read Blogs." There were a ton of results, as you can imagine. Here's a quote from someone named Leah about using them to keep in touch with friends:
"But my writing is different from my speech...just like being with me in my home is different than being with me in a strange, new setting...just like being with me alone is different than being with me in a group. The more ways I have to get to know a friend, the better. And when friends are in different states (or even countries), it's an easy way to be in communication -- to know the little things that have given joy or frustration that day, what are the big ideas they're contemplating, to know the cool new restaurant they visited last Friday." (From a blog called Something Else)
Without blogs, I never would have heard what Leah and people like her had to say about this question. I'd have lost touch with many more friends along the way. And I would have to hassle my friend Matt every couple of days with inane phone calls to try to keep up with his goings-on.
Comments
Thank you for explaining "blogs" for me. I'm not very computer literate, and was never comfortable with going to blogs since I really wasn't sure what would happen. Now I know that they are just another type of website, I will start checking out more blogs!
Posted by earthanimal | January 30, 2006 4:53 PM