Remember blogging before blogging?
I don't think the term "blog" actually arrived in my repertoire until far after I began using an online journal. Let's see.
First it was www.opendiary.com, which then turned to freeopendiary.com, and got bombarded with spam...It was free which was the main reason I used it. I got paranoid and left. www.opendiary.com still exists, but I don't have an account there anymore. I used that thing every day back then, though. It was so addictive. I even met a few people from there. Those were crazy times.
There's a domain I haven't even typed in at least five years. Since a young and flowering 13, I was "online" but I always had AOL or some other crummy version of the interwebs, or no internet at all. I didn't actually start using the internet as a public place until around the year 2000. Was I a late bloomer? Even if my unwitting parents paid for AOL back in 1994 for $3.99 a minute after 8 hours or some crap like that? I still can't forgive myself for all those countless hours with other teenage chatroom losers. Yes. Chatrooms. At least I'm admitting it. Did the general public even have open online journaling websites before 1998?
Then some time in 2003 or so, I migrated to livejournal and used it on and off over the years, always using the same anonymous log in that I always had. At the present, I use livejournal for the juicy personal stuff in private entries. I still feel the need sometimes to put it all "out there", but I can't make it public like I used to. I don't feel anonymous anywhere. I swear even when the movie "Hackers" came out, there was still an ounce of anonymity to be enjoyed on the internet for a good while. I don't know why I'm trippin'. No one even reads my "real blog" let alone a completely random one on some huge blogging site.
I won't even comment on myspace. Ask me how I magically deleted the blog function of my myspace page.
Yes, I sucked it up, learned the basics of web design and created my own personal blog on my own domain. My "blog" is now a bone-dry catch-all of online journaling: about as exciting as a glass of water.
I don't want to write anything I would consider interesting in fear of how interesting I might find it in a year or six months. I'm way to critical of myself as a writer these days. It's a trap. Nothing personal ever goes public anymore. Keeping a public online journal about personal stuff used to be blogging. It was blogging because you always mixed in your social commentary. You wrote about anything and everything. Then social commentary took over people's online realities and one person's blogs became a place for other people to blog, where groups formed. Jesus Christ - now there are blogs that are considered News sites.
It's just really strange to me. It used to be a more personal experience, and now it just feels like another part of my professional life. I don't know how to write things anymore that show who I really am. But yet, who I am is not who I used to be. I don't really feel like it's the same outlet as it used to be and I miss the feeling of freedom it used to bring me. I've been chasing it for a while now, and I'm not sure I'd ever be able to experience anything like that again.
The point is, I felt like a real blogger back then even when it was a time before blogging became so common. I didn't even realize what I was doing. Of course, it was new to me and I was twenty so I posted about every little thing in my personal life in what I thought to be an anonymous venue. I reveled in the feedback from strangers about my thoughts, ramblings, my fiction. I got really personal and I was very...real.
When I started a desk job staring at a computer and the internet all day for 35-40 hrs a week, the internet was so much more of a real place than it is now. Websites and blogs can now define a person in this new world, and can show a person off in so many more ways than I ever would have dreamed of back in the year 2000. But are those real people out there? Are they all feeling just as pretentious as I feel when I post shit like this? Or are they REAL? Of course most of them will say yes!
First it was www.opendiary.com, which then turned to freeopendiary.com, and got bombarded with spam...It was free which was the main reason I used it. I got paranoid and left. www.opendiary.com still exists, but I don't have an account there anymore. I used that thing every day back then, though. It was so addictive. I even met a few people from there. Those were crazy times.
There's a domain I haven't even typed in at least five years. Since a young and flowering 13, I was "online" but I always had AOL or some other crummy version of the interwebs, or no internet at all. I didn't actually start using the internet as a public place until around the year 2000. Was I a late bloomer? Even if my unwitting parents paid for AOL back in 1994 for $3.99 a minute after 8 hours or some crap like that? I still can't forgive myself for all those countless hours with other teenage chatroom losers. Yes. Chatrooms. At least I'm admitting it. Did the general public even have open online journaling websites before 1998?
Then some time in 2003 or so, I migrated to livejournal and used it on and off over the years, always using the same anonymous log in that I always had. At the present, I use livejournal for the juicy personal stuff in private entries. I still feel the need sometimes to put it all "out there", but I can't make it public like I used to. I don't feel anonymous anywhere. I swear even when the movie "Hackers" came out, there was still an ounce of anonymity to be enjoyed on the internet for a good while. I don't know why I'm trippin'. No one even reads my "real blog" let alone a completely random one on some huge blogging site.
I won't even comment on myspace. Ask me how I magically deleted the blog function of my myspace page.
Yes, I sucked it up, learned the basics of web design and created my own personal blog on my own domain. My "blog" is now a bone-dry catch-all of online journaling: about as exciting as a glass of water.
I don't want to write anything I would consider interesting in fear of how interesting I might find it in a year or six months. I'm way to critical of myself as a writer these days. It's a trap. Nothing personal ever goes public anymore. Keeping a public online journal about personal stuff used to be blogging. It was blogging because you always mixed in your social commentary. You wrote about anything and everything. Then social commentary took over people's online realities and one person's blogs became a place for other people to blog, where groups formed. Jesus Christ - now there are blogs that are considered News sites.
It's just really strange to me. It used to be a more personal experience, and now it just feels like another part of my professional life. I don't know how to write things anymore that show who I really am. But yet, who I am is not who I used to be. I don't really feel like it's the same outlet as it used to be and I miss the feeling of freedom it used to bring me. I've been chasing it for a while now, and I'm not sure I'd ever be able to experience anything like that again.
The point is, I felt like a real blogger back then even when it was a time before blogging became so common. I didn't even realize what I was doing. Of course, it was new to me and I was twenty so I posted about every little thing in my personal life in what I thought to be an anonymous venue. I reveled in the feedback from strangers about my thoughts, ramblings, my fiction. I got really personal and I was very...real.
When I started a desk job staring at a computer and the internet all day for 35-40 hrs a week, the internet was so much more of a real place than it is now. Websites and blogs can now define a person in this new world, and can show a person off in so many more ways than I ever would have dreamed of back in the year 2000. But are those real people out there? Are they all feeling just as pretentious as I feel when I post shit like this? Or are they REAL? Of course most of them will say yes!