John Dvorak weighs in on The Blog Phenomenon. He's a bit critical of weblogging although he sees it as a step up from the earlier static web pages, what he calls "vanity pages". I think they're definitely a step up because they're easier to update. He then goes on to list what he thinks the potential motivation people have for blogging: "Ego gratification, Antidepersonalization, Elimination of frustration, Societal need to share, Wanna-be writers". Certainly when I look around the weblogs of Blogger and Livejournal I see plenty of that. Teen angst abounds! "My boyfriend left me" "My job sucks" yadda, yadda, yadda. Want an example? Click here for a random Livejournal blogger. 9 times out of 10 it's some student or fresh out of school twenty-something fretting about something.
My motivation was simpler. I deal with a lot of email every day in the course of my professional life, but I also get a reasonable amount on my personal account. I usually like email on my personal account if: a) it's not spam and b) it's not some blind email forward of another email. In the first case it's just glorified junk mail and in the second case it's usually either a joke making email rounds, electronic hearsay, or the internet's version "chicken soup for the soul". It's a rare thing to get a piece of email actually written by the sender relaying first person experiences. My friend, Stu, understands this and actually writes awesome email diatribes that he sends out to his friends via email, sometimes cc'ing a dozen friends at a time. If he does forward a joke, it almost always has been cleaned up and filtered so it doesn't have 6 "forwards" and a bunch of '>'s from all the quoting.
As my domestic family grew, I initially thought of sending friends and extended family emails with updates-- both text and pictures. A few things came to mind: a) will the recipient want this news, b) what if the recipient is on a slow modem and doesn't want to wait several minutes for email to download to see the half dozen pictures I've "attached" so he can get to his mail, c) how can I help relatives peruse the last several events more easily (text and pictures) . So, believe it or not, my interest in blogging was to try to be polite to the recipient/reader. With a weblog, it is the reader who pulls the news, I'm not pushing it into his email inbox. The reader gets news on his time, when he's ready and when he feels like it. The thumbnail picture preview pages make it easier to find just the picture you're interested in without downloading those you're not. Lastly, I'm not clogging your inbox.
So, as is common, I disagree with John Dvorak of PC magazine. Then again, he's paid to be a bit of a curmudgeon. It's hard to take him too seriously.