IM Diaries?

This is in response to Oz's post about email diaries. I had a similar experience at one point a few years ago, except mine occured on IM. I have a friend who I was intially introduced to by a mutual friend in real life, but who I first got to know well on IM. We were both working boring summer jobs far away from our normal circles of friends, so we ended up talking online a lot, sometimes for hours every day. When we got back to school, we started to see eachother in real life more, but we kept up with the incessant IM conversations for a long time. The instant messaging program that I use keeps a log of every conversation I have, so I've been able to go back and look through our conversations to see a very interesting record of both the beginnings of our friendship and, more generally, my life at that point in time. I doubt I would have ever had the inclination to keep up that kind of record for myself. If I had, I probably would have included very different things. Those conversations contain so many funny anecdotes and stories that I probably wouldn't have considered worth writing down for myself. I sometimes wonder if serious bloggers are really writing for themselves, or if their online persona is shaped by the bloggers and commenters who read their site.