A blog is nothing more than a diary that you keep on line instead of locked and hidden under your mattress or in your underwear drawer. A password has replaced the little lock that prevented the considerate mother from reading your secret hopes but in no way deterred the nosy little brother who shared your private thoughts at the dinner table. A diary made a great Christmas present for your best friend, they were inexpensive and every girl wanted one, even if it turned out she never wrote a word in it. Those blank pages held the promise of dreams and dates, dances and personal dramas. For some of us the discipline of the calendar format and lined pages was daunting. It demanded daily attention, a devotion to detailing a young life that we just didn't have yet, maybe never would. A book of blank pages did not assign us a 200 word essay every night, nor did it limit us to one small sheet when we were full of angst. Even words were not necessary, a penciled heart with an arrow through it spoke volumes. The diary held our most private thoughts.
There's nothing private about a blog. It's a diary meant to be shared with relatives, friends, neighbors, and strangers, the more the better. (Actually, you can restrict who gets to see your blog but who would want to do that?). The exponential growth of the readership is exciting and rewarding to the blogger. In some cases, a blogger even can benefit financially by hosting ads and hyperlinks directing readers to businesses tangentially related to the subject of the blog. There are political blogs, cooking blogs, medical blogs, business and financial blogs, blogs for home schoolers and home handymen, speciality blogs by invitation only for violin makers or medical facilities, and on and on. All you have to have is an idea, an opinion, an experience to share. And a host site where you can post your blog. Blogger.com is one that is pretty simple to learn to use. Thank goodness. Used to be only the smart young computer generation had blogs. Now grandmas can do it.
But you can't press a flower in your blog like you could your little diary. The "post" page won't show a blurred ink spot where a tear fell late one night. We can't wear our password on a chain around our necks like we did our little key. (That was the only way to be sure it would not be discovered.) And we can't ceremoniously burn a blog when we want to erase certain young men from our memories.
Well, I guess we could burn it to a CD but that seems counter productive.
Here are some interesting blog facts:
In 1994 Justin Hall created the first computer diary. Between 1994 and 1999 John Barger coined the word weblog and Peter Merholz turned weblog into blog.
In 2002 Heather Armstrong was fired from her job for writing on her blog, dooce, while at work, thus creating the verb to be dooced which means fired for blogging.
And in 2004 Merriam Webster named "blog" the Word of the Year.
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