The concept of a Weblog has always amused me, all the way back to some time in 1999 when I adapted Newspro to add to my old journal on Hypermart. Sometimes I wish I had pieces of that journal around, as the earliest I have is Feb 11. Blogs are in a lot of ways IM's to the general Internet. It's like talking to yourself, and hoping someone out there overhears you and has something to say or add, starting a conversation.
Community based blogging (Livejournal and Open Diary to name a few) had once again shifted the perspective people held about blogs and their purpose. Commenting on people's thoughts, and finding other people became easy, centralized, and much more public. Now that it has happened, it is probably pointless to look back and ask if it was truly wise to create such a thing.
It is the community aspect that separates things such as Blogger from Livejournal. There isn't as much of a community in Blogger as exists with others, and in a lot of ways, it's a good thing. The ability to add comments is something only programmers (or people with lots of time) do, and Blogger sites tend to be independent of the Blog community on the whole. Livejournal on the other hand, has tools for searching by interest, region, and more. It is possible on Livejournal to look through one of your Friend's postings, look through their comments, find someone that you think you would like to talk to, and start talking to them. It's not to say this isn't a bad thing, nor is it to say it is good; it simply is.
So what impact does this have on the undefinable Internet community? Probably not too much, although like a chat room, one more method and medium have been created for meeting other people with common interests. The biggest impact then, is seen in the individual person and the results vary on a person to person basis. You, as a user get your friends using it, and then you get friends of friends talking to each other and conversing, and the thing just expands outward from there. All you ever did was introduce 'em. We live today in a world that makes these things possible. Someone on the Internet can read someone's thoughts and feelings in complete anonymity until they decide to make themselves known (if at all).
Okay, I suppose you want to know why I did all that rambling up there. I began thinking back to the time my journal was "violated" and how it made me feel knowing people were taking my personal thoughts and gossiping about them. I tried then to grapple with why this was significant, and I still grapple with it now. What compels you to go look for the journal or blog of someone you know or just met? The safe answer is you want to know more about them, but sometimes the more realistic [or pessimistic] answer is you want to see what they have said about you. Suppose then the person did say something, was it good, was it bad? It doesn't matter because then you talk about it, and that's how the trouble begins.
I know many people who "blog" thinking they are anonymous when really they aren't. Based on the day to day entries, it becomes possible to know who someone is. It tends to be one of the worst parts of blogging. The more you want to express who you are to the world, the higher risk you run of showing the world who you are. So, even with this risk, why to we bitch, moan, and angst to the general Internet? Perhaps it is because we want to think someone out there is reading it and understands, or maybe just because we want to think that nobody will ever find it on the net.
This whole thing ended up going off in some direction I didn't even think it would, so I will probably cut it off here. Still very pissed though at someone who probably doesn't even think they did any wrong. Also very pissed that I can't talk about it here because of the nature of the "blog".
In response to "The Curse of a Community Blog":