Memories of Blog

During our first class meetings and the intervening time,I was unable to recall a time when I had actually read a blog regularly or for its own sake. Sure, I had had them linked for me .

Friend on AIM: "u have to check this out!!...link" or sometimes just "link"
Me: "...haha...that's kind of funny I guess." (Dear god, this sucks. Why are they linking it for me?).

Or sometimes I had run into them when googling for something that might actually be useful. However, I usually found the format of the blog itself to be repellant. Without fail, the information I was actually seeking would be buried deep within the back-entries, and I would realize that I really didn't give enough of a damn to sift through the blogger's breathless attempts to make their life seem interesting to perfect strangers. After all, there were about 200,000 other google results that would probably be more helpful and less painful to navigate.

When I sat down to write this post, though, I remembered that I did read a blog regularly for a time in high school. A guy I kind of knew had a blog (we didn't call it that though), in which he would post strange and often tangential rants and the occasional link (It was an inverse blog, or something) about school, politics, emo music, or whatever else was pissing him off that day. Those of us who knew him, not to mention some who didn't really, read this thing religiously. It was often quite funny, and it dealt with incidents that we often had witnessed or been part of. Much like the A-listers in "We've Got Blog," it became a minor mark of status to be quoted or otherwise referenced on this guy's blog, and his posts were actively discussed in "real life." All in all, I have good memories of the thing, though I'm sure that I would not be as amused by it if I read it today. Also, he had something of a creepy, full-on sexual crush on Ann Coulter. Not cool.

Sadly, he took the blog offline at some point, so I can't provide a link. I will say though, that in the context of this class, I find my memories of this blog interesting because it did not represent an extension of the author's identity into the internet community, so much as a means of easily sharing his thoughts with members of his offline community. I suppose any blog you could look at pretty much fills that function, but the incestuous, reciprocal linking, back-biting blog community did not seem to be a factor to him. In other words, the fact that it was online was a means to an end, and not really a defining characteristic.