Monday, June 21, 2004

External validation, blogs, and me

I'm not really sure what I expected when I started this blog. I've never been much of a diarist. In college I started a journal of sorts, and though it often went neglected, I managed to keep it up all the way through till graduation. I lost it when I upgraded computers and purged old data, accidentally forgetting to transfer it to the new hard drive. Even so, it wasn't that great of a tragedy. Most of the entries were shallow affairs, and there was little I really wanted to save.

I've always known about blogging, and I've got a few friends who've been at it a while now. It seemed like an interesting practice, your own personal soapbox from which to add to the immense background noise that is the internet. No great event or significant tragedy proved the final prompt, I just clicked on the little blogger icon off a friend's page and in a only few minutes I had this thing set up (I'm sure it looks it). When I started, I didn't think I'd care if anyone ended up reading this or not. After all, in theory, this is supposed to be for me. It just happens to be widely accessable, and if someone had a take on a post, they were free to add their comments. But after getting my first comment, I began to see the situation differently. I have to admit that I felt something good, a sense of encouragement when I recieved my first comment. There was a rush knowing that someone else had taken the time to tag along with me, even if it were only long enough to read a few lines of text.

I'm still writing this thing for myself. Though some of my posts are written with an eye to the outside world, I'm not pandering to the audience. Besides, it's not like there've been a deluge of comments anyway. So I continue doing what I set out to do, whatever that is. Writing for my own sake, at my own pace, about the kinds of things I feel I'd like to cover. Even so, for as long as you decide to hang around, I appreciate the company.

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