On blogging - public, private, pictorial..

So I built this blog hub a few weeks ago, and it has transformed my blogging and made me think more about doing it 'properly', instead of - as usual - just brain-dumping into one of my passworded blogs every day. Because of the hub, I'm rethinking what blogging is for and why, where and how I do it.

Because bloggers are increasingly influential. By my estimations, at least 50x more people read them than ever comment and from what I read in the newspaper and casual, throwaway comments I hear politicians and commentators making on the radio, the blog world is very closely monitored and considered. It's like Speaker's Corner just magically multiplied itself and plonked a version in every study of every house in the country. A traditional establishment politician's nightmare. Orwellian, but with a delicious spicy twist.

Blogging is empowering. It's good for the soul to be able say what you think and publish it to the world, with little or no censorship. Like Wikipedia, it's a fantastic basis for autodidacticism on a national level. Networked, interactive, powerful and free.

And, as well as growing explosively, it's evolving at a rate of knots too. Almost everyone I know now is capable of picture-blogging and most can create a hypertext link - at least of the WYSIWYG variety. I recently learned how to link images to other sites and I love that concept, having used it extensively to build the hub. Picture links use a different part of the brain to text links of course, and I still feel a little frission of delight when I come across real ones that lead somewhere else. So that's the way blogging might go next, I think. It's very exciting.

But there are problems with blogging too. If you splurge everything publicly (as I sometimes did) then of course you're exposing yourself and your vulnerabilities to all those silent readers. I was shocked and dismayed to find that some people who knew me in real life were silently reading, taking it all in and never commenting. I wasn't blogging just to other bloggers and possibly a bunch of faceless, nameless strangers. I was also saying things to people who did know me - and I was supplying the kind of information that those people would never give me in return, making for some very one-sided connections. I didn't like that. It made me increasingly uncomfortable.

I'm an open kind of person, and so I resisted the temptation to go passworded for a long time, but in the end I found it was the only way to say what I wanted to say in that kind of totally transparent and confessional way, including personal information, pics of the family and the house and so on, without constantly wondering who might be reading and what they might be thinking about it. But then I don't want to disappear. I still want that public forum: the soapbox, the random connections that come from public blogging. The mental discipline of trying to present my thoughts and opinions in a clear and interesting way.

The hub brings it all together, but presents a dilemma. Do I link to the private stuff too? All of it? (In the end I didn't link to all of it.) It was the result of several requests I'd received to link all my writings in one place and it was in the back of my mind to buy some webspace and link it all from there, until EF showed how it can be done from a blog instead - much simpler, and really all that's needed.

I've been blogging for nearly four years now and have got to know several people through it very well. It's caused me some upset (not all comments are nice ones!) and challenged my thinking. It saves me writing thousands of pages in paper diaries! It saves me from finding a priest, or a therapist and it saves my physical friends' ears quite considerably(!) freeing me up to concentrate more on them than my own issues. It can be a bit of a cop-out.. I'm thinking of some occasions when I've possibly blogged some opinions that should have been said instead. But when you're using your own identity and not hiding behind any other, that's perhaps justified. I've always found it easier to write than to speak.

I'm fascinated by blog comments - on other blogs as well as my own. Have you noticed how some of the blogs of well-known public figures never ever receive any comments? They're obviously widely-read, but it's as if the readers are so awe-stricken that they daren't speak, or the chasm between 'normal' and 'famous' is too wide and deep to be bridged by a blog comment. I can't just find an example of that, now I want one. Maybe it's less common than I thought then.

If you want to increase blog traffic and fill up your comments box, saying certain very controversial things will have that effect. Having a baby, moving house.. all those life-changing activities do seem to be of special interest to people, moreso than day-to-day stuff. And of course there's the schadenfreude factor. Some people take great comfort from reading other people's bad news. That's the underbelly of the blog world, isn't it? It's there, but we don't like to dwell on it.

But it makes me feel very good when people tell me they found out about home education, autonomous learning, or frugal living or something, from one of my blogs. Or even, that they worked out how home ed would be possible for them by reading the many home ed blogs that are 'out there'. That's excellent news, IMO.