Around 10 years ago I was reading an advice columnist in the Edmonton Journal. The young lady writing in for advice said she recently went on a date with someone, in which this date mentioned he had a blog. This young lady went home, read this blog, and wasn�t too impressed with some of the things this man had written. The question: should I dump this guy, based on what he wrote in his blog? The answer: dump him immediately, because anyone who has a blog is an attention-starved loser.
Words that hit home for me because I�d been blogging for about six months at that point. And because of those words, around every six months or so I take a good hard look at this blog, and now, the entire world of my online footprint, and try to figure out why I keep putting out there what I keep putting out there. No matter what I decide, I ultimately choose to keep going, and I have for at least 11 years now. It�s been going on for so long that now I�ve hit this, my 2000th blog entry. 2000 entries! 2000 things that have been burning in my mind that I just needed to share it with the world!
Even though Blogger reports this is my 2000th entry, I know my online footprint is far greater. I first ventured online in 1997. The dot-com bubble was starting to expand, and there was just something monumental back then about being online. I knew I had to be a part of it. So a friend of mine directed me towards Angelfire, and I set up a webpage to promote my little college radio show. It was cute. It was fun. I also did an opinion column for the school paper, so my website started serving as a handy archive.
But as I�ve pointed out when I�ve done this analysis every time, things exploded in 1999, when I graduated from college. I no longer had my college radio show. I was no longer writing for the school paper. I grew desperate for a creative outlet. And that�s when I realized I still had this website. So I figured I would keep writing my opinion column, and start posting it once a week on my website. The term �blog� hadn�t entered the lexicon yet, so I kept referring to my online postings as a column. I started dreaming big with the column. I had grand fantasies that some publisher would discover it and offer me a book contract. I still believe that deep inside every blogger beats the heart of a frustrated writer.
This blog � Midnight Ramblings � I�ve always considered to be a different beast, though. I started this blog in the spring of 2003. I was still teaching English in Japan, when my laptop crapped out. It was still very important to me to be maintaining some kind of online presence, so I wanted to come up with some kind of quick and easy replacement that I could easily maintain an hour a week at an Internet cafe. A lot of my friends were embracing Blogger, so I signed up. My online presence was maintained.
Once I was able to get my computer going again, I even started the column again. The column and the blog actually ran concurrently until 2006, when I moved to Athabasca. I said I�d start the column again once I got settled in. I�ve been here four and a half years now, and I still haven�t gotten back to it. I always saw the column as being real writing, and not the napkin doodles that this blog is. And real writing takes work.
Besides, I�ve got so much on the go now when it comes to my online presence. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, a podcast, this blog, a second blog I write at work...it�s so easy to develop an online presence these days. I was talking to that friend of mine who steered me towards Angelfire all those years ago, and I asked him, �If we had Facebook and Twitter and MySpace and all that back when we were in college, would building an online presence still have seemed like a big deal?� And he replied, �Probably not.�
With everything I have on the go online, I sometimes see it as this gigantic forest fire. What was once a little campfire I built to keep myself amused has grown to this raging inferno. And, it has come back to burn me quite a few times. When I worked in a grocery store, I wrote a few columns about the idiot teenagers I worked with, only for those idiot teenagers to be very cross the next day. That�s when I learned that changing names to protect the innocent can be very little protection. When I was hunting for my first job in radio, I�d frequently blog about how difficult my job search was going, and some of my professors from NAIT would e-mail me the next day about how sharing such tales of woe could hinder my search. So I stopped sharing my tales of woe. Heck, I still have an old classmate from NAIT who refuses to have anything to do with me because I used my blog to make a few sarcastic comments about her blog. That�s when I figured I should stop writing about my life altogether.
You hear far too many stories these days about people who�ve been fired because of something they wrote on Twitter or a picture they posted on Facebook. 10 years ago, those stories first started concerning things people wrote on their blogs. And as I�ve said, those couple of times I�ve been burned have been enough to make me very, very cautious. When it comes to wondering what to put online, I�ve begun following a philosophy that one of my professors at NAIT told me as to what constitutes objectionable material on the air: if it�ll embarrass your mother, don�t do it.
I think I have this forest fire under control, but I still fan the flames with entries like this. Why do I keep fanning those flames, though? Probably for the same reason why I started doing this 11 years ago. It gives me a creative outlet. There are things I want to do, want to try, and this gives me a platform to do it. Even though I express it less, that heart of a frustrated writer still beats within me. And, just like they told me when I was trying to break into radio, you�ve got to keep practicing. It�s the only way I�ll ever get better.
I was once told that blogs are for people with little to say and even less to do. That advice columnist all those years ago called bloggers attention-starved losers. But the thing is, you�re still watching the show. And if you bear with me, it�ll become a show worth watching.
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