I’ve spent the last hour reading a blog that one of my best friends from high school writes. While reading his intensely deep and descriptive blog, I keep asking myself…”what is a blog supposed to be?” Is is just a collection of timely news stories like what current companies are doing, or should it be a deep look into someone’s life? My friend’s blog is incredibly honest, detailing the events that are going on in his life right now in a novel-like way, letting his readers delve deep inside his mind and discover whats going on. Then I read other blogs and they are all about news, products, and how they got drunk last night at the biggest party in town.

Then I start thinking about vulnerability and the fact that maybe people who won’t put a personal journal online are not quite as open or vulnerable as those who would. So naturally this leads me to thinking about myself, and where I fit in all of this train of thought. My blog has mainly been about the things I have been doing over the past 4 months, but everything is pretty much on the surface. A reader would really learn nothing about me from reading my blog that couldn’t be obtained from a casual first meeting conversation. Does this mean I am a closed book emotionally? Or does this mean I’m just reserved? How does expressing yourself online differ from writing in a private journal in the confines of your room? The one thing that I do know is that the ability to read other people’s journals or blogs from a distant location is an entirely new concept that has been brought on by the digital age.

I was scanning through blogger today and just happened upon a random journal from some girl who was writing about problems with her current boyfriend and other friends at school. I’m reading all of this drama and then occurs to me that reading a person’s journal whom I’ve never met, never seen, and never will meet is an amazingly curious idea. Here she is publishing her life online, and as I look to the end of the post, I see 0 comments. Well, that is to be expected. Who really cares anyway? But in reality, I do care, because I’m sitting here reading about her life at 8:00 PM on Friday night and actually enjoying it. I enjoy the honesty, I enjoy seeing situations in which I have found myself in many times before, and this familiarity makes me smile. But I won’t comment, of course not, why would I? I don’t know her, and commenting may seem like I’m some kind of peeping tom that is spying on someone else’s life. But then again, she is publishing this online, so can you really blame me? I don’t comment of course, I close the page and go out to eat with a buddy.

Back to my friends blog. He has written online for 4 years now, and has published some of the most amazing posts I have ever read, yet many of the posts have no comments. I can navigate over to technorati and look at some of the more popular blogs about technology or design or music and see people who have 10 or 20 comments for each post about seemingly mundane subjects such as the latest CSS code, or the newest Apple products…..look down. We seem to be eager to comment on technology or music or anything inpersonal, but once people actually start talking about feelings and problems we don’t want to touch it. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not blaming our society or technology or excluding myself from the foray, because I know I’m as guilty of this as anyone. I’m not advocating that news and current event blogs are unimportant or mundane, but I do feel that personal blogs are perhaps more of what the original intent of a blog was or is. So in conclusion, I will be attempting to provide you, the reader, with a more in depth look at what is actually going on in my life, instead of what is going on in Cupertino. I still can’t resist sometimes though, I mean who can resist talking about a shiny new mac?