Ceci N'est Pas un Blog

No, really. It's not. Here's why.

I love to write. And I'd better; I have an entire degree in How to Write Good. As a kid, I had whole boxes full of dog-eared journals and sketchbooks packed with painfully detailed descriptions of whatever variety of teenaged angst happened to be my flavor of the week. (Didn't we all?) Sometime in the late '90s, when the university started giving everyone a few megabytes of server space, I put up a little personal site full of links to prog-rock fan pages and random notes about whatever projects I was working on. (And, occasionally, more teen angst.)

After a while, "blog" became an actual word (ugh), and services like Blogger made it easier for average Joes and Janes to pretend to be Important Writers. I ditched the little notes on the personal site in favor of Blogger posts, regularly updated, over the course of about 2003-2009. Thousands of posts. Mainly about things no one would really care about, but there were a few exceptions that scored, well, scores of hits. A rant about United Airlines' credit card somehow kicked butt in the search engines and eventually resulted in a pretty nice official apology. A photo post of stuff you could get on a stick at the Iowa State Fair got added to some Yahoo! links-of-the-day list and I ended up with a few thousand new readers ... who stuck around for a week, maybe two, tops.

In '09, when I was first getting into Drupal as a content management platform, I brought all the content from the Blogger blog back onto my own domain, and kept posting once or twice a week. But here's where it gets complicated. With the rise of the social networks and all the online transparency that rode along with them, it wasn't really OK any more to just hop on over to your blog, hit "create new" and write down the bones. Everything very quickly became all about personal branding, and the real beauty of having a blog - being able to rant about your credit card company, or kvetch about family politics or your messed-up relationship status or just whatever - disappeared once you were confronted with the now very real possibility of having your boss, your client, your grandpa or your future employer scrutinizing every line looking for the spaces between the words.

And while I'd like to think that those thousands of blog posts I'd accumulated over almost a decade weren't "dangerous" material when it came to maintaining my own personal brand (in my eyes, at least, they'd come a long way from those angsty high school journals), I did notice that there seemed to be too many times when I'd have something on my mind, want to write it out, and then think better of it. In our brave new world of individual branding, it even seemed as if some of the stuff I'd written about when I was a real journalist and had an actual Sunday column wasn't appropriate for posting any more. That's a pretty nasty game of "what if."

Then there's the whole "Bowling Alone" idea of the Internet, as a form of self-expression, actually acting as an isolating force. (Well, that's kind of a stretch; Robert Putnam wrote his fantastic treatise in the days before blogs, but the idea still translates.) Most of the time, whatever problem it was I wanted to write about would actually be treated to a better sounding board if I just picked up the phone, called up a friend, and asked to bend his or her ear for an hour or two down at the local coffee place. I love blogging, I love tweeting, I love Facebook, but quite simply, they've made it easier to never leave my house, to never actually interact with real humans face-to-face on a meaningful level.

So, for now at least, I'm back to writing in paper journals - the consolation is that, now that I'm a grown-up, I can afford the nice hardbound Moleskine-style ones. I know, of course, that once something's out on the Web, it never really disappears; if someone really wanted to get their stalker on, it wouldn't be difficult at all to find all those old blog posts - a quick trip to archive.org would do the trick nicely. And as far as letting one's personality shine through online is concerned, there's still Twitter and Facebook for making huge gaffes in the public space. But a blog? Not right now, not for me. I'm happy to keep life's notes with pen and paper for the time being - or better still, over a cup of coffee with a few friends.

And with that, I'm headed over to the coffee shop.