Blogging?

[papayahed]

You know you're old when you have to ask "What's the purpose?" to some popular thing.

So, what's the purpose of blogging? I got Chris's email and it had me wondering? Should I blog?

[Nightshade]

what email ...how come you got an email....oh checked that email account so did I...:blush:
sad panda?! do you wear mascara then :p sorry couldnt resist well no need to be sad about me Im here always...
Umm I think papaya ( although this is the first time Ive actually met a blog) that the idea is you can go on and on about ypurself for a whole thread and no one will interuppt you...ABSALOUTE POWER!!:brow:

[Taliesin]

Basically, people blog so:
*they shouldn't tell ten people the same thing ten times over, but could write it up somewhere
*to express ones opinion about many things, like politics, religion, new book of X et cetera.
*giving advice to people about something (for example IT)
*expressing yourself. Writing stories and stuff, writing ones dreams up somewhere et cetera.
*organizing something.
We use ours for the last two usually.

[Shannanigan]

Taliesin's got it...I started my first blog to clue all my friends in at once with what was going on with me and how I felt about all their drama, lol. I never minded the idea of someone reading my diary, so blogging is heaven for me.

Really, it's just another great and entertaining time waster :D, much like the Games forum, lol. I love blogging, it can get ridiculously fun and it has really, really, really opened my creative ability and tuned me in to what interests others and what doesn't...

[Virgil]

what email ...how come you got an email....oh checked that email account so did I...:blush:


Well, how come I didn't get one?

[Scheherazade]

Well, how come I didn't get one?Virgil,

Is the email address you gave to the Forum at the time of registration still active? Checked your Junk Mail folder as well?

[Virgil]

Virgil,

Is the email address you gave to the Forum at the time of registration still active? Checked your Junk Mail folder as well?

Oh email address. I was thinking PM. I will check my email when I get home. Thanks.

[Themis]

Really, it's just another great and entertaining time waster :D

Ah. That really sums blogging up. ;)

[Chava]

Somehow, I've always felt they seemed so redundant...?

[underground]

Basically, people blog so:
*they shouldn't tell ten people the same thing ten times over, but could write it up somewhere
*to express ones opinion about many things, like politics, religion, new book of X et cetera.
*giving advice to people about something (for example IT)
*expressing yourself. Writing stories and stuff, writing ones dreams up somewhere et cetera.
*organizing something.
We use ours for the last two usually.

some people also blog to describe their daily lives. that'll probably fit in the first point, though, cause i would assume they're describing their daily lives to someone.

i started blogging because i wanted the money i have a (small) chance of winning. see my link below for more details. </shameless plug>

[vili]

Taliesin's list is pretty good, especially when underground's answer is added to the list.

Let me add one more, though. Not all blogs are personal ones. For example, two of the sites in my signature can be described as blogs, yet they don't contain almost any of my own opinions or views. Instead, I simply use the blogging system to run websites on matters that I am interested in and that I don't think get enough coverage online.

Actually, maybe that already falls under Taliesin's "organizing something".

[papayahed]

From what I've heard I really don't need to blog! phew! I was worried there for a second.

I do have a question though.....Who reads these blogs?

[subterranean]

Freetimers?

[blacksheep]

i like blogging. i get to actually be the other part of myself. the outspoken insulting part. no one on the web actually know me... except a few people... ok, maybe some...
but in general, no one i know reads what i write. privacy. real free speech.

yah... free speech that no one reads.
there was this person that i'd email soo many times because i kind of knew him but the chances of me actually meeting with him again and him affecting my life were so miniscule taht i didnt have to worry about him blackmailing me or thinking badly of me. eventually, he got mad at my emails so i resorted to blogging... which i didnt really keep up because i didnt have time and because i wanted sympathy and feedback. Some blogs offer that but getting them from complete strangers is different from even getting feedback from a random guy you met for a week.

[Shannanigan]

From what I've heard I really don't need to blog! phew! I was worried there for a second.

I do have a question though.....Who reads these blogs?

Honestly...nobody reads my main blog anymore, but I like having it there to look at no matter where I go. I was in a blogging communnity for awhile that was almost very much like this forum except it was just allllll blogs and all people blogging about their daily lives, reading eachother's and posting comments, posting about each other's posts. It was friendly, with a few exceptions, but when it got out of hand accounts would get cancelled... That was back when I had TIME to record my daily life and to read others'. I found it quite informational, entertaining, and definitely a GREAT time-waster, lol...

Some people keep blogs to track a diet, an excercise program, or a personal project of some sort. I once kept a blog for a history class I was in because my views were changing so quickly as the class progressed that I felt the need to record them down each day after class. It's basically idle now, but I like to read it back over, read the comments, and see how much I learned that year...

[mtpspur]

Many of the above comments are all well and good but I decided immediately no blog for this poster. I do not mind in the least being up front about myself--good, bad or indifferent (as I remind the kids) but for me to blog would be to feed the self centered all about me part that I like to keep starved and on a long chain while looking for some empathy in myself for others to balance out the emotional neediness.

I read to escape boredom (and the dishes). I like to read here and there in the forums and watch some of the mmebers grow and mature in their lives and thoughts and experiences. Gives me hope that God really does know what's He's doing.

All in all you are a civilized crowd-mostly. Felt like a dinosaur in the comicbook forums. I've gome from being an admirer of Frank Miller and Alan Moore to almost wishing they had never wrote anything past 1998. Lost Girls indeed!!

[Nightshade]

Some people keep blogs to track a diet, an excercise program, or a personal project of some sort. I once kept a blog for a history class I was in because my views were changing so quickly as the class progressed that I felt the need to record them down each day after class. It's basically idle now, but I like to read it back over, read the comments, and see how much I learned that year...

What a good idea, if I can disguss or even pretend to disguss that is get nto that frame of mind ( which I do whenever I see the forum colour scheme ( even though for some wierd reason the old one bothers me now:() I might might be able to get my head round this book Im reading for my course.......:sick: :D

[vili]

I do have a question though.....Who reads these blogs?
If you write about your personal life, like many do, the readership is mainly your friends and relatives. It saves you the time of having to write to them each individually when something happens, although it also forces you to put down the version of the events that all of your potential readers can understand.

If you write about some specific topics, you get another type of a readership -- those interested in that particular topic. Some such blogs count their regular readers in the hundreds of thousands.

In addition to having regular readers, you of course also get random readers who find your posts through the search engines or through some of the services that try to keep track of the blogging world (technorati.com is perhaps the most famous of these). Especially if you write about a wide range of matters, it may happen that one of your posts is liked by a few persons, which then has a snowball effect, causing that particular article to suddenly receive a huge number of visitors. My general personal blog, for example, gets around 200-400 visitors a day (most of them arriving through search engines), but a link to a certain post I had written last summer suddenly started to circulate last month (partly thanks to stumbleupon.com), and I received more than 10,000 visitors on that single post in just two days. I don't think any of these readers became regular readers, but then again what I do with my blog is not really meant to be regularly read.

I think that in the end the blog-craziness that we have witnessed in the past few years echoes the "home page" craziness of the mid-90s, when the first wave of internet users realised that they could build their own websites, and suddenly everyone was making static websites about themselves. Blogs, of course, are fundamentally different in that they are not static, but dynamic in their nature. But the basic idea is there -- to leave a footprint and to share some information and ideas.

To be honest, still a couple of years ago I didn't see the point in blogging. However, at one point I wanted to set up a website that tracks the latest news in linguistics, and with a friend of mine built what I thought was a really neat dynamic website that allowed me to add news items easily. It was only after completing the software that I came to realise that what we had actually written was a very simple blogging software. I only then realised that not all blogs are about one's own personal lives, and that the blogging softwares out there can be used to run all sorts of websites.

[Pensive]

It is my first time with blogging, unless I count my "my-space account" which I used only for a couple of days but it seemed to me as if it was not my cup of tea.

Personally, at the moment, I am using "blogging" option in this forum as a public diary, hehe, I find it the most suitable word to use. :D

[papayahed]

hmmmm..... Most times when I have a weird dream I put it down on the dreams thread. I've been blogging and didn't even know it!!

[Pensive]

hmmmm..... Most times when I have a weird dream I put it down on the dreams thread. I've been blogging and didn't even know it!!
Is that also blogging? *confused*

In this case, I blog now and then.

[Shannanigan]

lol...I guess posting stuff about yourself online on a regular basis could kind of be considered blogging?

Honestly, because this forum has the General Chat section where everyone shares the events in their life, blogging may not be all that popular with the members :)

[SleepyWitch]

good point Shanna! I had a look at the blogging section but then I thought I don't really need a blog seeing as there is general chat.

there's this girl (young lady) in Germany who has a blog about her everyday life that attracts thousands of readers every day. (I haven't read any and don't intend to). I heard she writes a lot about her cat and readers have complained about that, but apart from the cat the blog is extremely popular.

heehee, as for myself, I am a tiny bit attention-seeking and self-centred, so you'd think I'd like blogging. But somehow I can't warm up to it. One reason is that whenever I sit down and try to write up everyday stuff I can't think of anything. (That's because I'm a very saaaaaaaad person and don't care about everyday stuff, so there isn't much to write up there :) ).
I mean, who wants to know about things like "I went to the pub on Halloween" or "I bought a CD" (not even I myself want to know about them ;))

The only things I can think of are either more private or univ-related and I wouldn't want to post those all over the internet.

I don't mind sharing my feelings, opinions, ideas such as they are with others (even random strangers), but I wouldn't want things like "I fancy my prof, he's so gorgeous" or "My students were noisy today" to be read by either my prof or my students :)


- on the other hand, a blog might be the right thing for me, seeing as I tend to RAMBLE anyway :)

[Stanislaw]

From what I've heard I really don't need to blog! phew! I was worried there for a second.

I do have a question though.....Who reads these blogs?

Heh, heh heh...er no one...atleast for mine...:D


hmmmm..... Most times when I have a weird dream I put it down on the dreams thread. I've been blogging and didn't even know it!!

I see bloggers...they're every where...and some don't even know they're bloggers...:D :D :D

heh...here be my latest blog creation...as me old blog-pire completely died:

http://spooksofyore.blogspot.com

its about old horror movies...and well...I have a new post to make so I'll be updating it soon.

[vili]

I can add one more reason to blog: to be able steal someone else's content. :(

It happened again today. I had spent most of my Sunday morning writing a nice little article on something I care about, and then today I found out that someone had simply copy-pasted it to their own blog, without even bothering to mention the source. It is not the first time something like this takes place, but it always hurts just as much. :(

On a brighter (or maybe not) note, there have also been some rather interesting blogs from people who live in some rather interesting places. For example, there was this hugely popular blog maintained by some Iraqi guy before and during the invasion/liberation/make-your-pick of Iraq. Rather than getting the news filtered by the multinational organizations, this one gave (or at least was assumed to give) some rather interesting personal views from someone right at the centre of the whole thing.

SleepyWitch's post also reminded me of another use for blogs: as educational tools. There have been a few courses run with the help of blogs at least in theoretical linguistics, which is my field. I haven't personally tried that (getting my students to read the emails I send to them is already difficult enough), so I don't know how well it actually works.

[baddad]

is there a blog about blogging?.............am I blogging now in a surreal sort of way?..................or should I say, "Am I blogging now in an ' ethereal' way ?".....whether or not I actually post anything anywhere?.............

Confused? okay................are we "Blogging" if we merely share our perspective, feeling or opionion with someone we pass on the street, as the lilely outcome of such an encounter is the information given being passed along if only in idle chat or passing converstation....................or is it only the new lable, "blogging" that has caught on as something "new"...........or....

[mir]

I CAN'T FIGURE OUT TO POST ANY COMMENT-THINGIES ON MY BLOG!!!

*hides in corner and cries*

[blacksheep]

since i have soo many blogs, i can't get half of mine to work.
i've mostly gone back to the internet webjournals instead of actual blogs. livejournal has a Frank the goat as a mascot! goats are related to sheep! especially black ones!:D

[vili]

are we "Blogging" if we merely share our perspective, feeling or opionion with someone we pass on the street, as the lilely outcome of such an encounter is the information given being passed along if only in idle chat or passing converstation....................or is it only the new lable, "blogging" that has caught on as something "new"...........or....
No, that wouldn't be blogging, or at least I wouldn't call it that. :) A blog (or a "web log" from which it is derived) is a type of a website that lists entries usually in a reversed chronological order, and that (usually) allows comments from readers. The definition of the word is more tied to the technology behind it than it is to the content published with it.

[Nightshade]

is there a blog about blogging?.............am I blogging now in a surreal sort of way?..................or should I say, "Am I blogging now in an ' ethereal' way ?".....whether or not I actually post anything anywhere?.............

Confused? okay................are we "Blogging" if we merely share our perspective, feeling or opionion with someone we pass on the street, as the lilely outcome of such an encounter is the information given being passed along if only in idle chat or passing converstation....................or is it only the new lable, "blogging" that has caught on as something "new"...........or....

hey :wave: where have you been??!!

[Logos]

I can add one more reason to blog: to be able steal someone else's content. :(
You can try reporting them to their ISP. Document it (show proof it is your content/dates posted etc.) might not get you anywhere but worth a try.

[SleepyWitch]

I

SleepyWitch's post also reminded me of another use for blogs: as educational tools. There have been a few courses run with the help of blogs at least in theoretical linguistics, which is my field. I haven't personally tried that (getting my students to read the emails I send to them is already difficult enough), so I don't know how well it actually works.

i had a look at your homepage, might read the linguistics section sometime. I'm a linguist too :) well, I'm only a humble student of English and Geography but my fave subject is English linguistics, which I also teach as a student tutor (at our English department they do valency, lexicography, collocations and idioms and lots more. Our prof has published a big fat valency dictionary of English.). what kind of theoretical linguistics do you do? I hope you're not one of Chomsky's evil disciples? ;)

"getting my students to read the emails I send to them is already difficult enough"
they seem to have a lot in common with mine :)

blacksheep what's the difference between a webjournal and a blog? i had a livejournal once. I didn't know it's not a blog

[vili]

You can try reporting them to their ISP.
That's what I was planning to do as well, but the ISP had no contact address, and looked a bit dodgy anyway. In the end I contacted Adsense, as the person used their ads, and whether or not it was actually due to that I don't know, but the copied article was quite soon afterwards removed from their servers.

[underground]

blacksheep what's the difference between a webjournal and a blog? i had a livejournal once. I didn't know it's not a blog

i would guess that by "journal," we're really thinking about one of those awesomely academic revelations complete with work cited, not journal as in a "diary." livejournal is a blog.