It's a blug's game

I love blogging - and I hate it too! Public logging of one's personal perspective has such peculiar dynamics about it that make you wanna hurl and harangue at the same time as hauling up a chair to let it all out! And I guess that's just the point!

So what's wrong with it?

1. Well, for a starter it's highly personal - on the whole, which often makes one wonder what the hell it's doing "out there" in that expanding ethereal mass called the "public domain"!
2. And for another thing, it's subjectivity spans not just it's topic but - and this is the part we hate most - also it's mood! Far too many people use it to vent or spill things they would never tell anyone if they could see the whites in their eyes. It's a facebook fallacy that no-one can "see" what we look like while we're writing our nonsense! The imagination is a very powerful thing, no?
3. But how about my own relative hate for submitting imperfect posts (like this one!). I live between the distant poles of the Open Source ethos (just get it out there as fast as you can and see if it works - others will improve you) and the Brit in me that says it has to be fit for the Queen!
4. And there's the angst I have always faced about my cyclical habit of losing things - specifically whole operating systems and life data in my cyclical fanaticism with updating to the latest Linux whizbang distro I can find... (But now there's XML! and I can port this blog to a file for import into another system at will - Google, you are brilliant!)

Well, is there anything right with it?

Errr... not really, I guess.

These days I spend most of my time on forums rather than blogs. Information dissemination has to be one of the most useful aspects to the world of web, and for me, if I ever read a blog it's coz it has info in it that I wanna get my hands on.

"But what the "hell" are you blogging for if it's so terrible?" I hear you yelling!

Ahhhh..... you got me! OK - so there must be something right with it in my own estimation, if I bother to do it at all, no? Well, you would be right there; imho "blogging" (may I be liberal?) has some wonderful spin-offs, and here are just a few I could think of.

1. Venting is not all bad. We all need to do it, and we don't always have access to that person we love enough to sit with and "let it all out". Of course, I would strongly encourage anyone to "imagine" human interaction while they vent, so that they don't expand that ethereal mass any more than is absolutely necessary.
2. Technology has wonderful benefits, of which one is communication, and I love to see the look on my wife's face when she sees a pic of our daughter in whatever is her latest venture, just to name one of a multitude of things we can communiblog if we take the time.
3. Another is literally the record in history of a time, a place, a thought, that you can access and share far more easily than you ever could a paper journal.

And I could go on.... but it's already 4:30 am here in Malaysia, and I should have gone to bed a long time ago. I posted this simply because I haven't, in a long time, and it's about time I started again. Having gotten struck byte lightning in an installectrical storm over a year ago, I simply haven't had the heart to go out in the rain since - until I just discovered that Google will earth my digital footprint for me while I sort out my own local operations - and finally settle on "my perfect Linux image"!

So go on, why don't you?

Improve on this if you can! What do you love and hate about blogging? Let's see if we can put cyberspace to rights from behind the comfort of a keyboard! And please remember - God is watching ;-)