Why do you blog?

More personally, why do I blog? Why did i start blogging? What keeps me involved in blogging? Why should I spend precious minutes of the day trying to key down mildly coherent text?

Expand the whole thing. Its a WEB LOG dammit, if some of you morons have been too slow to realize the fact.

What follows from now on is nothing but "A portrait of the blogger as a small child" (intentional infringement, but I don't plan to write 'Ulysses' anytime soon) . Since the dawn of Btime (blogger times i.e.) , countless individuals across the world have keyed in still countless characters of text into the world wide web. The web is very resilient, thankfully, and its informative part still easily exceeds the 'blogged' part of it.

It started, quite simply, with the word 'log'. Its a place where you maintain records in chronological order. Its on a network, so you call it a weblog. it contains information about you and your personality, so it becomes a personal web log. Which is all very good.

I don't go through a lot of random blogs but when I do so, I come across topic titles like:

• Eve teasing in India
• How google took Youtube
• detailed character sketches of soap opera stars
• Why Pluto deserves to be a planet.

Each of these is a topic, which is 'supposed' to reflect something/anything about the writer. A blog portrays YOU to the rest of the world. Write about the breed of dog you like. Write about what you ate for lunch. Write about your adventurous trip to Burkina Faso last month. Write about your kids doing well at school. Thats a 'personal web log'.

This doesn't seem to be the way it works.

Some people have their breakfast, and write about how many calories it contained. There are others who eat the same breakfast, but when it comes to writing, they prudently write an epic on why airborne toasts land jelly side down.

Hard to understand, I'll say. A blog is a place for personal traits which reflect to the outside world. The individualism in its content can never be over emphasized. One 'should' blog as a one-way means communication to the outside world. Its your own Pioneer Plaque to people known and unknown. But bloggers like the ones in the cases above do not seem to mind. They write and they write, as if their blog is their own uncensored database of facts.

Is this freedom of speech? Yes, if the entire blog is a literary experiment and its readers are similar literary experimenters, posting similar narrative/expository material on their own blogs.

My question now narrows down to these literary experimentalists:
Why do you blog then? Do you write all that happened in your life today? You wouldn't, because there are plenty of things about you which you wouldn't like the world knowing. Do you write for enjoyment? in that case you don't need online publishing because you enjoy writing as such.
Do you blog to gather attention? Probably yes.

And there you have it. Elaborate posts/comments/discussions about unrelated exotic tidbits in the world. Views of intellectual Utopia, assertions of stone and rebuttals of steel. Neutral perspectives, pros, cons. All this, without a word about the human behind it all. Ever increasing libraries of pointless digital rhetoric.

The creative genius clashes, and more blogs like the 4 above are written. The redundancy increases. Each blogger chips in, trying at each step to prove how infinitely mistaken his/her fellows are.

And to crown it all, this disease is contagious, because it leads me to write what I just wrote, something totally unrelated to my existence, and makes me out to be a literary experimentalist like all those already out there. In an attempt at exposing the irony of irrelevant blogging, I have just committed the crime myself.



and no place for the pretty face feature, but it will return.....