Category: Blogging

Blogging has reawakened my interest in the internet.

After years of using the internet, I had begun to feel that it, like much of everything else in our society, had been taken over by commercial interests. While I enjoyed the convenience and savings of ordering software and hardware for my Macintosh from the net, I wasn’t willing to pay $40 a month for the convenience.

Even when I did find articles on the web, they were often useless, either little more than encyclopedia articles or written with an obvious bias.

Personally, I found it more and more difficult to find intellectually stimulating ideas on the web. Either I didn’t know how to find them, or I was unwilling to wade through the tons of pages looking for relevant material.

Since finding blogs several months ago, though, I have a renewed interest in the internet. First, as mentioned in an earlier blog, I found some great sources of articles on the web and I didn’t have to spend hours doing it. Some of those sites are found in my links section, but I still rely daily on wood s lot.

More recently, I found several personal, philosophical sites that are close to my own personal philosophy, yet with a different enough perspective that I use them to inspire and to help refine my own thinking, sites like Cloud 9 , The Obvious? and whiskey river. I’ve even enjoyed briefly exchanging emails with some of them, but more importantly than that, I feel like there is another community, an international one at that, that I am a part of and that inspires me to focus my ideas and put them down on the page.

This community may not offer the kind of feedback that a personal dialogue does, but, at its best, it reminds me of an international university where ideas are shared among colleagues.

When I tell people I’ve started writing a blog, I would like to think that their first question would be, "What’s the address of your blog?"

It’s not.

Few friends ever get around to that question. Inevitably their first question is, "What is a blog?" Strangely enough, as often as I have been asked that question, I still don’t have an answer. What’s worse, I’m not even sure why I produce one, much less why others do it.

All I really know is that when I’m not hiking I spend a lot of time on the web, and there are certain pages that I go to more often than not. Now, I still have my home page set to MacCentral, and I still start out by reading some news pages like the Seattle Times and the New York Times, but beyond those I have begun to spend more and more of my time on blogs.

Almost invariably I start out with wood s lot. Sometimes I end up spending the entire session following the links on his page. Now, I know virtually nothing personal about wood (and that doesn’t bother me at all), but I do know that his interests and mine must be remarkably similar, though certainly not identical – I have neither the time nor the desire to plow through some of those articles he refers to. I have discovered new interests, though, by following some of those strange links. I’m always amazed, and a little awed with the extent of his links and the kind of in-depth articles he can find on an internet that increasingly seems to be dominated by sheer fluff. And, hey, anyone who links to Leonard Cohen articles is just all right with me.

Strangely enough, the blog I read most often after wood s lot is the journal of a writing man, which is almost diametrically the opposite of wood s lot . It’s a personal log with nary a reference or link in it, though it occasionally includes a poem or a pleasant picture of the English countryside. Mostly, though, it is simply a statement of the personal moods of the oldgreypoet, little more than a nice, short visit with an interesting fellow in England. Maybe it fulfills my need for some social interaction on a day when I’m stuck inside talking to a machine, but, for whatever the reason, I find it a pleasant break in the day.

I have never really trusted definitions, and I have certainly never wanted to be "defined" by others, but I suspect that any definition of a blog would have to somehow find a means of including these two sites in its definition.