Metablogging

Fionnaigh asks why we blog, and why her readers return to Beautiful Monsters. I started blogging after reading two particular weblogs on and off for about six weeks and a year respectively, and bent back tulips started off as a little place to experiment with my very minor HTML skills and to keep some record of what I was doing over the year. Although I've always liked the idea of it, I've never kept a diary or similar and I was curious to see whether I could keep up with the project or whether it would wither and die in a few weeks or months.

Since I started getting linked to and claiming some regular readers my blogging has become more audience-based than some of my earlier entries. I'm more careful with what I blog about because I want to make reasonably sure that it's relatively interesting rather than posting an entry detailing my plans for the weekend or what I bought when I last went shopping.[1] So about ten weeks ago I started keeping a journal as an outlet for even more informal writing and I've found it to be, more than anything, a really useful tool for giving me practice with stream-of-consciousness writing. I think it's certainly loosened up my writing - I've noticed that it's easier to dash off emails now, even long and involved ones. Previously it would take me an age to construct a sentence and the end result would sometimes feel stilted and awkward, a few phrases hacked together, and it didn't really sound like me. But writing so much has allowed me to be more natural in informal writing and I'm pleased with the result. The irony, of course, will be if I get into my General studies exams this week and discover that my skill for formal writing has vanished because of this.

Depending on which blogs you look to as evidence, I think that blogging and having your own website consisting almost entirely of your own thoughts and writing inevitably points to it being about one person. It's a place where you can build up a little profile of yourself, or try to capture what you were like at that point in time, what you were reading about and what you thought was important at the time.

So, is bent back tulips primarily meant for me and there just happen to be other people out there who listen in? Well, it used to be. Back in the Early Days when I hadn't a hope that anyone else read it or found it interesting I wrote for my own amusement and didn't even tell anyone online about it for about six weeks after I began. But now that I've discovered the buzz of feedback I do feel more like I'm writing for other people. And it is a buzz - knowing that other people appreciate your words gives you a sense of pride and satisfaction. It's nice to feel valued, particularly if you've tended to be on the sidelines when it comes to real life. Fionnaigh says, Ok, so other people read my blog, but most of the time the communication is one way - from me to everyone who wants to listen. It's far more self-centred than newsgroups and mailing lists. And it is - whereas on a mailing list your messages can be lost in the crowd of others', with a weblog you eke out your own corner of the internet and everything immediately visible is written solely by you.

A lot of the gratification of feedback via comments or email - at least, in my case - seems to be because of my inherent insecurities and lack of confidence in my writing, and my disbelief that people find bent back tulips worth reading. This is why I always get a warm fuzzy glow whenever I notice anyone blogrolling me, because I'm just really pleased to think that someone else likes it enough to keep coming back. However, in the past I didn't get particularly excited when someone linked to me, because (in the two examples I can think of when people linked to me In the Beginning) I presumed they'd just noticed that they were on my blogroll, and were placing a courtesy return link. It was only six weeks or two months later when they each left a comment that I was excited, and thought, "My God! They actually read my blog!" Getting a positive response about my writing gives me a sense of validation and I'm slowly believing that somewhere, out there, I have Readers. Unless it's all a huge conspiracy and a joke on me...

Answering the second part of Fionnaigh's question in a more general way, I'm wondering why I read blogs. Why they're so addictive ("just one more... one more won't make any difference... it can't hurt, can it?") and why they take up such a lot of my time. A couple of days ago I received a weblog survey to complete as part of a research project for someone doing an Informatics degree at the University of Buffalo. I had to calculate how many weblog entries I read on a typical day, and was pretty shocked to find that it averaged about 35-40 just for my blogroll, let alone those that I encounter when clicking on links from the original 35-40, when browsing Daypop and the like, or just bloghopping. It takes up quite a serious chunk of my time and I wonder why it's so difficult to stop. In time I may even get to the stage where I need my weblog fix before I start work in the morning, and will be writhing at the thought of all those thoughts and conversations going on that I'm not reading at the moment. Of the weblogs that I read daily (ie., all on my blogroll) some I like reading because I just like the chatty nature of their writing, and even when they blog about fairly inconsequential things I appreciate it. Some I read because they talk about issues that I'm interested in or topics that I hope to learn about by osmosis (this generally applies to the tech blogs). Some I read because they can generally be relied on to entertain me, either through their wit or the sheer quality of their writing.

In her article, Fionnaigh quoted someone saying, Online journals also lose peoples' interest when the person?s life itself is no longer very interesting or of any interest to the readership, implying that people read blogs to follow the soap operas of other people's lives. Sorry, not this girl - I have to say that my favourite bloggers could write about almost anything and I'd still read it and enjoy it because it's really their style of writing that attracts me rather than the content. Good content helps, of course, but it's mainly how they write rather than what they write that I'm interested in. I don't know whether other people feel like this or if it's just me, but this applies to things other than weblogs. I think this is why I find it so easy to reread all my books, because I love the experience of reading them rather than just wondering what's going to happen next. I mean, I do love a good plot twist that I didn't see coming, as a few of my favourite films will attest, but if there's not much else there other than suspense building up to the climax, I'd find it impossible to read or watch the book or film again enjoyably.

Sometimes in the blogosphere (by the way, can't someone come up with a new word for that? I really despise that word) it doesn't come easily to associate some bloggers with the idea that they are Real People and it can be a real shock seeing photos of them or hearing their audioblogs because the unreal entity who's been putting all these bits of text on a screen suddenly assumes a persona and is transformed into an unrecognisable real person, who talks and everything! Some people initially just seem like names on a screen, and I don't think that this is due to brevity of exposure to their writings. I think it's due to whether their writing style is believable as being words coming out of their mouths, a style similar to natural speech (without the long pauses and the umming and ahing). In my opinion most, if not all, of the people whose blogs I read have the ability to write in their own voice, which matches pretty closely their speech or thought patterns. When the audblog meme spread at the end of April it wasn't strange hearing the voices of these people whom I'd previously known only through their keyboard output because there was a definite match between the two different media. In one case I was so delighted hearing the audioblog that I laughed out loud because his comic timing and sense of delivery was exactly in accord with his writing style and he was genuinely recognisable. I bet I could have picked him from a vocal lineup without ever having heard him before, as long as he was talking naturally. Strange but true.

Anyway, I seem to have digressed rather a lot from the original point of the post. What originally sparked this mini-essay - other than Fionnaigh's entry - was that tomorrow is the six month anniversary since my first post to bent back tulips. Go me.