For at least five years, I've been a pretty active person online. When I was as young as thirteen, I was participating in online forums, to learn about my then-tools of the trade (a game designing program called RM2K). Before I entered high school, I had already made about three online forums of my own, all using free online products, and I was learning about just how hard it was to create sites of my own.
There was one thing I never tried, though. Though I knew of the concept, I had never kept a blog. I never read blogs, never commented on blogs. Really, I didn't know the point. Why should I bother to tell people what I think in a private, secluded environment, when I could just as easily obtain feedback on public forums?
Then came the advancement of the RSS Feed.
RSS, for those of you that don't know, stands for Really Simple Syndication. It's a way to quickly look at a variety of things online. For instance, I read about ten web comics online every day. (Shocking, I know.) Instead of browsing to each individual web site, I can just acess that site's RSS Feed, and view all the new comics in one place. RSS got easier when browsers added RSS feed buttons in by default (now, even Internet Explorer puts them in), and became truly economic when Google and Yahoo added their own feed readers for use online.
Drupal, the Content Management System I use to run my site, has RSS feeds activated by default. It also allows for the use of a blogging API (like ScribeFire) to write a blog without accessing a site first. With this, I finally was able to keep a blog going for a sustained period of time without effort. And I've started to realize why blogs are so useful:
- It's quite cathartic. Ranting online about somebody who's pissed you off is about as useful as screaming at them for it: not much, but you feel better afterwards. When I really think what I've written is possibly offensive, I make sure to hide it from other people online. That way, I see it, and feel satisfied with myself, and nobody gets hurt.
- They're less intrusive. WritersBeat, a site I frequent, has quite a few people who use the Political Discussion area of the forum to rant and rant about what they hate, people who then ignore opposing viewpoints. Blogs are better for that sort of thing: people like me, who try to read everything happening on a site, aren't as likely to have their time wasted by it.
- You get to control the ads on your site.Merciless, I know, greedy, but it's so unbelievably true. Income, even if it's less than a dollar, makes you feel wonderful about yourself, about life, and about your chances of surviving the "real world" by just, um, loafing.
- Blogging will teach you how to write better. I already blog better now than I did two months ago, when I started. I hope to improve even further as I go on. Forum posts, meanwhile, because they're less you-centric, tend to stray from actually improving your abilities to convey a point.
- You get to make bullet points. Many forums don't let you make bulleted lists, which is really sad. Bulleted lists make you look so professional. I kid you not. Many people will only browse your posting if they can't see a list. It's wonderful. Better yet, if you're writing about politics, bulleted lists let the opposing sides argue you point-for-point.
It may seem odd to you at first. Blogging takes about as much getting used to as pretty much anything online, which is to say it's daunting for about five minutes, then you get it. But once you learn to blog, a variety of opportunities you never had before open for you, and you may find yourself able to do things you never could have imagined beforehand.
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