Web logging, or as it’s now popularly called (because of the wonderful evolution of language and universal laziness), “blogging” has taken over most people’s internet time. It’s been used for all sorts of purposes from news, editorializing, entertainment to good old porn lit and insomnia fix for night owls who just can’t sleep. While journal-writing had previously been a very private and intimate activity for people who loved to write and preserve their thoughts and memories in paper, now it’s been transformed into a whole new species. Online journals are not only about the content of what one wrote, but html, java script and web design, comments, polls and what have you.
Take my personal blog for instance. As the 336 thousandth user in livejournal, I started blogging in 2001. I was in my sophomore year in college and the internet is just beginning to become popular in the Philippines. There were very few Filipino users in livejournal and most of them were in the States. I had three active blogs, or online journals as I used to call them. They serve no particular purpose but to satisfy my narcissistic desire to publish what I wrote on prettified web pages accessible to strangers. I made “friends” with other bloggers who comment on my entries. Soon there were talks of eye-balling (EBs) or meeting with the online friends in person. The spectacle of blogging spawned a new way of meeting people, gave birth to a community.
Anything online back then was attached to the connotation of being nerdy or geeky. After all, one has to be pretty interested in the computer to spend so much time writing and encoding what one wrote in html, personalizing the appearance of one’s web page and so on. But the technical stuff ends there. Ultimately blogging is about writing, reading other people’s blog entries, commenting and replying to comments. One only has to be interested in communicating to get hooked.
Now, blogging has been simplified with sites like livejournal and blogspot that provide clients, which make modifying your online writing as easy as Microsoft Word. The proliferation of easy-to-create blogs provided by sites like friendster, recently caused the number of bloggers to multiply exponentially. Blogging has broken out of the geek community and has infiltrated the masses with every young friendster addict making his/her own blog. It’s insanely phenomenal.
I look at my four year-old livejournal and pat its digital head; it’s come a long way, baby.
Note: I realize I didn’t explain why we called our blog “the bunk bed battle.” See, we’re room mates and we sleep in bunk beds. And we argue, very diplomatically like proper ladies. And we’re very literal, too. I’m sorry to announce, though, that the above explanation will become obsolete by 2007, because I’ll be moving out and in to an old maid’s dorm somewhere in the campus.
-cha
1 comment:
True. One thing I love about how this whole blogging thing is developing is how it's become so easy to get up and running. I mean, I barely know anything about putting up a web page, or html, and yet setting up a blog for this class was a pretty painless process. It's pretty easy to post, comment, and make simple changes to my little creation. Don't really know how to do some of the other stuff, such as posting pictures or YouTube videos, those sorts of things, but am thinking with a little Googling, I'll eventually be able to manage even that too. :)
So you're an early blog adopter? Cool. :) Would you consider linking to your other blog(s) from here?
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