Confessions Of A Lifelong Blogger
I was blogging before I knew what the word meant.
I have been keeping a journal my whole life... well, not my WHOLE life, but by the time I was 16 it was a requirement. I didn't keep it to let a bunch of people read it, but it's funny how that seems to happen. I personally would never pick up someone's journal and start reading. Maybe it's something about people who understand what it is to document certain events. It's also the nature of nosey fucking bastards to pick something up and read it without asking. They would never write down certain things because they wouldn't want you to know (like the fact that your 19-year-old best friend is sleeping with the mother of your other 18-year-old best friend... thanks, dude. And you got mad at me because you read in my journal that I ALMOST slept with you EX-girlfriend? That's audacity). The irony is that even if you don't write it down, eventually the embarrassing thing will STILL come out, so why bother hiding it?
So later on I started keeping a digital journal, but those things disappear faster than the hardcopy/paper ones. One virus, and years of work would just go down the drain. I've had to adopt a "Oh well, shit happens" frame-of-mind in regards to them and say "Maybe that wasn't meant to be shared, it just had to be written" kind of attitude towards those. This was long before "The Cloud" was even thought of. Backing up was an activity you set aside an entire day to do. (None of you noobs remember tape backups, do you? Don't lie, I'll know! What was the one thing that could screw an entire back up? Post it in the comments if you know...)
Then in 2005, a funny thing happened. I don't remember how, but I ended up on a little site called MySpace, and I notice this little feature called "Blogging". I check it out, and I'm like....wait, whatthefuck? I can post things, whatever I want, and people can read and comment on it? Seriously?
My Blog was called "The Big Bad Blog". Didn't start off that way, but it evolved into it. Know why? Well, the tables had turned. At first, I had to hide my journal because everybody wanted to know what I was saying about them. Later on, things changed. It wasn't about what I was writing about them, they were far more concerned with what people were reading about them... My blog throughout my family is infamous. The way they talk you'd think I was documenting people's bowel movements. I never did. In honesty, I wrote about my interactions and frustrations. Sometimes, I named names. Sometimes, I didn't. The ones I think that really got to people are the ones that I didn't name names but people STILL knew who I was talking about, because actions still speak louder than words.
I miss the MySpace Blogging Community... now that, was a nasty bunch. You haven't met an internet mean girl until you've seen the ones that can mobilize an entire blog-clique to battle you on your own blog. I mean, they get NASTY. Oh, and coupled with the ever-changing blog rankings, things were hilarious. You had to be there to really appreciate it. On one hand, it was quite juvenile, on the other, it was very moving. I made friends with some of those bloggers and the friendships carried over, we followed each other into other social media platforms. Nothing brought things back like the old Blog-Gang of MySpace, though. I made friends with Adrianne Curry and Somaya Reece, primarily through comments on blog posts.
And while I don't have the tight-knit community of MySpace, I still have my own little corner of the Net carved out here, my Letters From Zion (yes, I am a Matrix junkie), and I created it because I was afraid of what could happen to my blogs on MySpace in the event that my profile would ever be deleted. There's 3 years of memories on there that would just vanish into nothing. The fear became so prevalent that I stopped blogging there altogether and it's more of an archive now. Kind of sad. Had MySpace come up with a way of backing them all up, I'd still be there most likely and when all the other people bailed on them, maybe the bloggers would have held them down?
So what the hell is this all about? No other reason than to test out the new interface on Blogger now that they are slowly merging it into Google+. I like the dashboard so far, it's clean, and it's the one thing I wanted so much to be on Google+ for. It's like they are building a social network around my blog instead of sticking blogging into social networking.
I still say this is the one place where Facebook most egregiously dropped the ball... or maybe it's better that they didn't fix it? People who weren't even ON MySpace would hear about my blog back in the day, I can only imagine what things would have been like on Facebook where familial connections are right in your face. I would have taken drama to an all-time high, even when it wasn't my intention. People should use the "Loop Of Life" test. If there is something that you wouldn't want on a video auto-loop of you doing over and over again, it's probably not a good idea for you to do it in the first place. Like you sleeping with your best friend's ex... somebody somewhere just might say something about it, as it relates to them.
Well, this was just a test, and I'm getting all crazy... internet people have short attention spans. Most people would have zoned out by now and pulled a Scott Pilgim "This is... this is... this is booooooring."
Sorry I couldn't entertain you this time... maybe next time I'll have the drama-llama in attendance....
I have been keeping a journal my whole life... well, not my WHOLE life, but by the time I was 16 it was a requirement. I didn't keep it to let a bunch of people read it, but it's funny how that seems to happen. I personally would never pick up someone's journal and start reading. Maybe it's something about people who understand what it is to document certain events. It's also the nature of nosey fucking bastards to pick something up and read it without asking. They would never write down certain things because they wouldn't want you to know (like the fact that your 19-year-old best friend is sleeping with the mother of your other 18-year-old best friend... thanks, dude. And you got mad at me because you read in my journal that I ALMOST slept with you EX-girlfriend? That's audacity). The irony is that even if you don't write it down, eventually the embarrassing thing will STILL come out, so why bother hiding it?
So later on I started keeping a digital journal, but those things disappear faster than the hardcopy/paper ones. One virus, and years of work would just go down the drain. I've had to adopt a "Oh well, shit happens" frame-of-mind in regards to them and say "Maybe that wasn't meant to be shared, it just had to be written" kind of attitude towards those. This was long before "The Cloud" was even thought of. Backing up was an activity you set aside an entire day to do. (None of you noobs remember tape backups, do you? Don't lie, I'll know! What was the one thing that could screw an entire back up? Post it in the comments if you know...)
Then in 2005, a funny thing happened. I don't remember how, but I ended up on a little site called MySpace, and I notice this little feature called "Blogging". I check it out, and I'm like....wait, whatthefuck? I can post things, whatever I want, and people can read and comment on it? Seriously?
My Blog was called "The Big Bad Blog". Didn't start off that way, but it evolved into it. Know why? Well, the tables had turned. At first, I had to hide my journal because everybody wanted to know what I was saying about them. Later on, things changed. It wasn't about what I was writing about them, they were far more concerned with what people were reading about them... My blog throughout my family is infamous. The way they talk you'd think I was documenting people's bowel movements. I never did. In honesty, I wrote about my interactions and frustrations. Sometimes, I named names. Sometimes, I didn't. The ones I think that really got to people are the ones that I didn't name names but people STILL knew who I was talking about, because actions still speak louder than words.
I miss the MySpace Blogging Community... now that, was a nasty bunch. You haven't met an internet mean girl until you've seen the ones that can mobilize an entire blog-clique to battle you on your own blog. I mean, they get NASTY. Oh, and coupled with the ever-changing blog rankings, things were hilarious. You had to be there to really appreciate it. On one hand, it was quite juvenile, on the other, it was very moving. I made friends with some of those bloggers and the friendships carried over, we followed each other into other social media platforms. Nothing brought things back like the old Blog-Gang of MySpace, though. I made friends with Adrianne Curry and Somaya Reece, primarily through comments on blog posts.
And while I don't have the tight-knit community of MySpace, I still have my own little corner of the Net carved out here, my Letters From Zion (yes, I am a Matrix junkie), and I created it because I was afraid of what could happen to my blogs on MySpace in the event that my profile would ever be deleted. There's 3 years of memories on there that would just vanish into nothing. The fear became so prevalent that I stopped blogging there altogether and it's more of an archive now. Kind of sad. Had MySpace come up with a way of backing them all up, I'd still be there most likely and when all the other people bailed on them, maybe the bloggers would have held them down?
So what the hell is this all about? No other reason than to test out the new interface on Blogger now that they are slowly merging it into Google+. I like the dashboard so far, it's clean, and it's the one thing I wanted so much to be on Google+ for. It's like they are building a social network around my blog instead of sticking blogging into social networking.
I still say this is the one place where Facebook most egregiously dropped the ball... or maybe it's better that they didn't fix it? People who weren't even ON MySpace would hear about my blog back in the day, I can only imagine what things would have been like on Facebook where familial connections are right in your face. I would have taken drama to an all-time high, even when it wasn't my intention. People should use the "Loop Of Life" test. If there is something that you wouldn't want on a video auto-loop of you doing over and over again, it's probably not a good idea for you to do it in the first place. Like you sleeping with your best friend's ex... somebody somewhere just might say something about it, as it relates to them.
Well, this was just a test, and I'm getting all crazy... internet people have short attention spans. Most people would have zoned out by now and pulled a Scott Pilgim "This is... this is... this is booooooring."
Sorry I couldn't entertain you this time... maybe next time I'll have the drama-llama in attendance....
Comments