Blog Blah Blog

Looking back on my childhood, I mostly remember toys and playing outdoors and watch cartoons on Nickelodeon and Disney Channel original movies. I remember coloring and playing board games and capture the flag.  However, I have a very distinct memory from first grade, in which my class of about 25 sat at outdated (now) blue-screened desktop computers.  These foreign machines used some slow electronic means of operation called dial-up and seemed pretty impractical to me.  Fast forward several years and I remember the torture of Type to Learn and the joy of Oregon Trail and Zoombinis. I understood the computer as a means of playing games like Bugdom and playing with things like WordArt.  Then I remember when I first discovered that nifty old communications tool called AIM.  Oddly enough, in every communications class I have taken, this form of social media has yet to come into discussion.  I remember having buddy lists and chatting with all my friends when I got home from school.  There were robots you could talk to like SmarterChild and info boxes you could fill with information about yourself.  These info boxes, were, in a way, my first experience in blogging.  Of course, it was not a continuously updated blog with a string of my previous posts behind it.  However, it provided me the opportunity to write whatever I would like for all my friends to see.

This, of course, was nearly a decade ago, and blogging has developed quite extensively since then.  I myself keep up with a number of blogs covering different topics.  Perezhilton.com provides me with hours of gossip about my favorite and least favorite celebrities.  Brobible.com shares humorous and useless information and news for the college-aged kids entertainment.  A personal favorite of mine is BrianJayStanley.com (Aphorisms and Paradoxes) which is an individuals inspiring and intellectual collection of thoughts and observations.  Aside from these I read random fitness and fashion blogs as well as an assortment of lifestyle, photography, music, or quotation blogs that pop up on google.  Most of the blogs I read are fairly well-known, main-stream sites, and the authors and founders typically profit from my viewing their pages.  However, I have, in my experience, come across quite impressive and inspiring blogs by individuals who merely post for personal pleasure or hobby.  In fact, I have come across frightening blogs chronicling the daily lives of anorexic females or blatantly racist males.  A country in support of free speech, blogs allow individuals to share their thoughts with the world, or maybe more realistically any person meandering around the pages of the web that comes across it.

While there are creepy and uncomfortable exceptions to the case, I believe blogging is a healthy and interesting way for people to share their emotions, hobbies, ideas, and experiences in a safe an interactive manner.  It is difficult, though, to differentiate blogs from non-blogs with sites such as textsfromlastnight.com and collegeacb.com.  The former consists of user-sent information, sorted through and posted by the site owners and the latter is a sort of anonymous chatroom based on college campuses.  I suppose neither of these could be truly called a blog, since neither is a string of postings by a specific or multiple specific writers.  However, site like this are allowing consumers more and more to become producers of their own favorite webpages.