Metablogging

The small circle of my friends who blog has expanded yet again, with Murph joining the throng. Gaining yet another portal into the life of someone I care about, I got to thinking about the nature of blogging itself. I wrote the bulk of this post originally as a comment on Troy's latest post, but noticing that it was growing rather long, I did the ol' Windows cut n' paste and brought it over here, and made my post on Troy's site a more manageable and polite few lines.

Many posts (at least those of the people I read) tend to be contemplations on somewhat serious subjects. Every person whose blog I read regularly (and I intend to set up a permanent link box on this page, stay tuned) is a person with whom I've spent a great many hours talking through the challenges of life with. The art of talking about issues has merit, but is ephemeral. E-mails also are nice, but they also have that transient quality (hey, you have to dump your inbox sometime). Reading about items this weighty (and not so - Ian's post on his, uh, regularity from a few days ago was at once hilarious and disturbing) in the form of a blog lends something of a permanence to them. I figure blogging is like instant publishing - there are now multiple copies of my words on servers across the country, saved in the temp file on the computer of everyone who has read here. So long as there is an electronic medium available (and Google doesn't go under), my words will have a certain permanence.

Granted, history is littered with the stories of those whose hubris was only matched by the severity of their downfalls ("Ozymandias," anyone?), so I"ll not put too much stock in the notion that my inconsequential little postings will have much more permanence beyond my maintenance of this particular blog.

Maybe instead of permanence, I was thinking more along the lines of accessibility. Right now, any person on the planet with internet access can read and respond to my thoughts. My thoughts, composed on my keyboard in my loft in my house in Washington State, can be picked over by someone in an internet cafe in Alexandria, Egypt. Simply astonishing. If only the writers of the scrolls in the Library at Alexandria could have had this.

Betcha they would've opted for DSL or Cable over dialup in a heartbeat.