A wee metablogging observation
So, I’ve never really found the question of what’s making the blogging meme so damn popular lately to be especially difficult, mysterious or interesting, personally. I mean, the individual vanity home page was invented about three seconds after the w3 itself; the blog is just an easy, templated implementation. Also, I think even keepers of personal paper diaries or journals (even those who go into mortifying secretive detail and hide their scribblings under lock and key) have always secretly written and longed for readership. So that everyone and his cat suddenly seem to be blogging right now, I don’t think that should be so surprising, nor that motives are very hard to understand here.
That said, I did notice something yesterday that I think explains a part of the appeal (or what the kids back in the zany dotcom boom days used to call “stickiness”) of weblogging software systems themselves. See, yesterday I went ahead and went back to Blogger and set up a separate new blog for strictly personal use. (For this here blog that you’re reading, I’m using Blosxom, if anybody cares. I wanted Blogger for the other thingo because setup requires zero thought.) It’s not that this other blog has supersecret private informations or anything
I just wanted a handy place to type little mundane notes and reminders to
myself. And so that’s the thing: while I’m typing away over there, I start wondering to myself, “why did I think I needed a blog going for this? Why type these items in a webform, why publish to HTML? Why couldn’t this just be a big text file, or a Word doc or something?” Well, apart from detesting to use Word, and the convenience of being able to access my little notes to myself from any browser, the real answer was immediately clear: automated date and time stamps attached to entries. There’s just something irresistibly cool about typing one’s random brain droppings as plaintext, and then seeing the result not only formatted with stylesheets, but organized into little dated dispatches, all at the press of a button. Without even noticing, I find myself utterly charmed by this simple bit of technical marvelousness, and I imagine I am not alone.
One final, completely self-reflexive note on this entry itself: I am still generally not sold on the stupid overuse of the prefix “meta-” (which strictly speaking signifies “after” or “behind”) in its popular sense of “one level of description up”, such as I’ve used it (jokingly, mostly) in my title right above, here. This usage pretends to be modeled after metaphysics or metalinguistics, but I don’t think that blogging about blogging really invokes the same sort of transcendence.