Just links
A friend mentioned to me today that he was sorry I'd given up blogging.
"I haven't given up blogging," I spluttered, insofar as it's possible to splutter on IM. "I've just been busy."
He seemed even less impressed when I went on to add that, anyway, his assertion that Blogging and I had parted ways wasn't even true - my tumblelog, horreo.org, is anything but inactive.
"But that's just links..."
*
This chat got me thinking about what had prompted me to start a blog in the first place, back when I hand-coded my very first post at this domain in September 2001.
I'd been a blog reader myself for a few months. Choice wasn't so wide in those days, but I did enjoy my regular visits to Sylloge, to kottke.org and to notsosoft (which is no longer online but whose writer now blogs at meish dot org). This seemed like a party I wanted to gatecrash, even I wasn't sure exactly why.
There was the writing, of course. The discipline involved in putting my thoughts into written words on a regular basis certainly appealed to me, as did the idea that I could write more creatively than I was able to do at work at the time.
There was also the community. In the dark ages, many sites didn't have a mechanism for leaving comments on individual posts, but that didn't stop us all from frantically linking to each other from a list of "Sites I like" in our sidebars, and we gradually built up our little communities that way. Many posts I (and others) wrote were often little more than, "I've found this new blog, it's really great: <INSERT LINK HERE>". When the person I linked to discovered my blog through her log files, she would undoubtedly come and see who was linking to her -- and often return the favour if she found we had something in common that she could share with her readers in turn.
And this leads me on to my final point, to what I have come to believe was and still is my main motivation for blogging: a desire to share. The web is home to many wondrous things, and having a blog seemed to be a way for me to point my friends towards some of those things that I considered worthy of their attention.
That's still the case today, really, both here - where I can be more wordy if I choose - and at horreo.org - where I simply point and say, "Go!"
At the end of the day, as my friend observed, it's just links.