The recent spat of blogging that has been done recently on NOTS has made me wonder what exactly blogging is. What it is that I am hoping to achieve with NOTS? Is it enough just to ramble on about anything in particular, or should the focus be on interesting and informative articles about various subjects, and should research be carried out to ensure quality of posts is high?
First of all, let’s determine: “what is blogging?”. There are a number of websites around that answer that question:
BBC Webwise – Ask Bruce – What is blogging?
Blogging is a way of collecting links to webpages and sharing thoughts and ideas with people online.
Blogs (or Weblogs) are basically online journals or diaries which are great for sharing information and ideas.
A blog is a personal diary. A daily pulpit. A collaborative space. A political soapbox. A breaking-news outlet. A collection of links. Your own private thoughts. Memos to the world.
Hmmm. The next question would be: “why blog?”.
Bruce at the BBC says:
Surfing’s no fun if you can’t tell people what you’ve found.
How many times have you sent e-mails to your mates with the address of a particularly interesting web page, annotated with your own hilarious comments?
Wouldn’t it be good to get your own web page where you could publish these comments, plus the links you find, turn it into a daily journal of thoughts and ideas and make the whole thing available to the world?
Seems quite simple when you put it like that. In other words, I blog so that I can tell people what I’ve found on the web. I don’t do that much. I don’t tend to email my mates with particularly interesting web pages either (in fact, I tend to delete the ones I get – no offence!). You could call NOTS a “daily journal of thoughts and ideas”, but I don’t tend to post every day, although I’d like to, if I had something to say.
So, WHY DO I BLOG? First and foremost, because I like it (even though it may not seem it, due to lack of posting). Blogging has become a phenomenon on the world wide web in recent years, and it gives a good feeling to know that I’m part of a global community when I blog.
Initiatives like deaf-blogs.com, which I contributed to somewhat, reinforced the gratification that blogging provides in what was, for me, a major way. To think of myself as one of the first bloggers to post vidblogs in BSL is just so cool.
Anyway, I’m going to do what was done over at Sandhill Trek, and invite fellow bloggers to tell me why you blog. I’ll do a later post incorporating some of the more interesting takes on this subject, and see if I can reach some sort of conclusion on this issue.