In order to prevent myself from senseless daily calls from my mother, I decided to write a blog about my snowboarding encounters when I was in Austria. I derive from a blogger family, but have always fought against being lured into that community. However, not feeling like paying high phone bills due to long-distant calls with my cell phone, I too was convinced of the benefits of blogging. With a whiff of shame I can declare I’m now an official member of the Blogosphere.
The Blogosphere. That’s not a word we heard flying across the room in conversations 5 years ago. Written with a capital ‘b’, you’d almost think you’re talking about some new kind of atmospheric layer around the Earth that was recently discovered, causing the ice in the arctic to melt and leaving us with skin cancer after several sunny days on the beach. Yet today, it’s been accepted as the collective community of all blogs worldwide and it’s getting bigger by the minute.
The key necessities for publishing world’s most perfect blog can be divided into two categories: the easily obtained and the not quite so easily obtained. The easily obtained include: a computer with access to the internet and a convincing way of thinking (actually, that last one is a gift).
The not quite so easily obtained necessities include: severe discipline, a great deal of friends who are willing to read what you’ve written, a good story, and time, for blogging indeed is a time-consuming activity.
You might think of bloggers as mindless idiots (that is, if you’re not one of us) who spend most of their days behind the computer uploading their so-called ‘interesting’ experiences online, and that anyone with access to a computer can do it, but it actually is much more than that. I won’t deny that there’s a lot of nonsense going around in the world of blogging, but it certainly isn’t just all crap. You might actually be entertained and maybe even learn something when you come across a well-written page of nonsense on a rainy Sunday.
Today, blogging has become a highly appreciated form of new media. Access is easy, it’s a good way to spend boring spare time, you can use it for whatever you’re interested in and the numbers on your bank account won’t dwindle to a horrifying number in the red zone. Blogs come in all forms you can possibly think of long after you’ve run out of breath: personal diaries, cooking blogs, corporate blogs, fashion blogs, project blogs, political blogs.. There are even blogs that concentrate on nothing else but spamming, the so-called ‘Splogs’. But what is that straight-backed secret formula that made people fall for blogging in the first place over the last decade?
In my opinion, it’s a combination of factors that you have to own that will get you hooked and lead you to the Blogosphere. Let this be known; you need to like writing in order to keep up a blog. Wait, let’s make that love. Furthermore, you have to be stricken by madness to do it, because only that will keep you going when you’ve made that solemn promise to yourself that you absolutely love blogging and will never stop doing so. Love and madness lead to the obsession that’s right in the middle of them, and that obsession brings you and others the pleasure in life we all look for, after all.
