On blogging days past

I've been blogging for over eight years.  Wow.  

Now of course, as the handful of people who have stayed with me for that long know, I used to write multiple times a day during the early years.  But in the past few, It's dwindled down to only a few dozen entries a year.   Back in 2001, before the internet took over our entire lives, and was available anywhere we went, before Facebook sucked away our time and Twitter sucked even more, blogs were a new concept.  You had to build them mostly by hand.  Blogger was revolutionary, providing code you could use to easily update your "weblog."   It was a time before identity theft, privacy concerns, and over saturation of peoples' opinions on the web.

Because these fears of being too revealing weren't prevalent, it was also a time when people wrote much more personally on their blogs.  I occasionally go to my archives and read things I wrote during the early years and would never post now.  Things about my life, what I was doing, what I was thinking, etc.  Others would do the same, and I'd get lost in a sea of links, clicking from blog to blog, reading about peoples' lives all over the world.  


I liken being an avid reader of blogs to watching a soap opera.  You get wrapped up in other people's lives and are fascinated by what is happening to them.  You laugh with their stories, you sympathize when they're full of angst, and you get mad for them when someone wrongs them.  It wasn't uncommon back then for someone to email another about having read their blog and striking up a sort of e-friendship (this was all pre-Myspace, remember.  You couldn't stalk easily!).  I got to know a good handful of people from New York, DC, Florida, and even parts of Europe.  People I never would have met had it not been for blogging, and people who I'd have deep meaningful conversations with.  

I recently had an online run-in with one of these people who I used to be (or thought I was) somewhat close with.  The dissolution of that relationship many years ago was unexpectedly hard for me...I guess I felt like I lost a friend, which is weird because 95% of our interactions had taken place via the internets (though let's be honest, that tends to be par for the course these days).


But the run-in got me thinking about how different life is now.  I don't talk to most of the people I met through blogging anymore, though a few I still check in with every now and then.  One I just recently reconnected with, and seven years later, it's amusing to read old conversations we had and see how much we've changed.  The rest...I will read their blogs occasionally, or maybe say hi via IM if I see them online.  We're not as invested in each other's lives as we used to be, but it's still nice to remember what we had.  


It's interesting that most of them don't blog as much as they used to either, and what they do is very different.  These days people can use the tiniest glimpse of your life to discern information about you, it's the reason "privacy settings" on Facebook are so important and cause such an uproar.  You have to be careful what you put out there.


Blogging has become an integral part of the internet now.  Everyone has a blog.  WIth a few clicks, you can have one set up and start publishing your thoughts for the world to see.  This is not a bad thing by any means, it's interesting to see what some people write.  But it's not the same as ye olden days.  Now if you can even find someone's email on their personal blog, and say hi, you never know what will happen.  They may think you're a stalker, they may never respond, or, if you're lucky, they may say hi back.  


I guess it's just overdone now.  Back in the day when blogging was new and exciting, it was something that you had in common with other bloggers.  Now you have it common with half the world.  And that might just a few too many (yet I will keep reading).