Philosophy of Blogging

With so many people engaging in the trend of maintaining weblogs, it was only a matter of time before I considered seriously maintaining one myself. And here it is -- my own blog.

Granted, I've maintained a web journal before in my old website, Inside Ed-ition, but I've never really maintained a blog using real blogging software, so this blog on Google's Blogger tool is a new experience for me.

Chatting with Chen on the bus ride over to Nashoba Ski Valley, I realized that the world has two types of bloggers: those that treat their blogs as a journal or a recording of the daily events in their lives, and those that treat blogs as a podium for commenting out on issues/articles/events around them. The first type of blogger writes in terms of "I did this and that today" while the second type writes essays about their reactions to current events. And I think the most skillful writers and bloggers would be those that fit into the second type but are able to slip in hints about what they've been doing. I'll treat my blog as an avenue for expressing thoughts and sharing insights into what I see and experience. If I can create anything that's even remotely like Philip Greenspun's weblog, I'd be happy with this blog. He's a previous professor of mine that knows quite a bit about web software engineering.

While categorizing people in terms of the type of blogger they are, it's also curious how accurate of a reflection a blog can actually be of a person. I would imagine that most people would have reserverations about discussing private personal issues in a public sphere, so I can only assume that people only post about those aspects about themselves that they want to emphasize to other people while hiding those aspects that they would prefer to keep private. In this sense, it might seem that a blog is really just a superficial facade -- an online mask that people use to accentuate their more desirable characteristics. The fact that I'm still choosing to maintain a blog shows that my philosophy is that the ideas that a person chooses to write about in his blog tells a story about that person.