Spured by a comment from Colin on one of my earlier posts, I’ve decide to enucleate the apology of the active blogger. There are of course many reasons to blog, a personal journal or “Dear Diary” turned public, a business marketing tool, a way for an aspiring writer (of any kind) to publish themselves, etcetera. I recently hopped on the blogging bandwagon for a combination of reasons. It’s a way for me to keep multiple people updated on what’s going on in my life without having to repeat myself a bunch of times. I can just say, “Yo, I did a back flip the other day, check it out on my blog.” Sometimes I just feel the need to rant, and writing it down, supposedly for an audience, somehow feels more satisfying than yelling at a couple people. Another reason, is that I “foresee” (if it’s not obvious), that blogs are to become a crucial part of the online experience, and as a sometimes wanna be web developer, I need to get my end-user experience research in.
Most reasons for blogging are personal, everyone has their own. But the most exciting reason for blogging is the possibility (and actuality in many cases) of an abstract online discussion network. This is the blogosphere. It is an open forum, a discussion board, it provides the same function as an instance of phpbb. But it has one major difference. The domain of the blogosphere is the entire web, whereas the domain of a phpbb (or similiar) disussion forum (e.g. the telemarktips forum) is limited to its specific instantiation. While this limitation can have its advantages, the phenomenon of communities within the blogosphere is amazingly interesting. With pingbacks and trackbacks a post on one blog can inform a post on another blog that it refers to it, thereby creating a topic/reply discussion much like a message board, but without the strict hierarchy. This lack of hierarchy (or heirarchy constructed only with metadata) allows any given post to be a topic for many different dicussions, and allows any given post to be a reply to many different topics. Think about it. It’s cool. More blogs with more links between blog posts means more and tighter blog communities.
Hmm. I’ve just come up for an excellent idea for a project while writing this. All I’m going to leak now is the name. It’s going to be called Jooleen.
blogosphere, phpbb, blog communities, why blog, reasons to blog, blogs
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on Monday, November 28th, 2005 at 3:53 pm and is filed under Ramblings.
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