It's a funny thing about blogging, that if one have a few frequent commenters, one can begin to feel as if one has long-distance friends, because a high volume of comments will reveal a lot about the person leaving the comments, to the point that one can make accurate predictions of a blog reader's response to certain posts. This of course depends on what one finds interesting enough to talk about or if one's blog has a dedicated theme. Still the point remains that if two people met and happened to have been reading each other's blogs for the past few years or even months, both would know a lot more about each other and some of their friends than people are generally willing to divulge on any other social site. (Assuming they try to be careful about hiding their details and only "friending" people they know, like I do.) However, this is impossible with a blog, because a certain degree of revealing everything about your life is inevitable if you're determined to write posts that others will actually read, and then reply to. This is not to make the claim that I have anything against my "bloglife", only that I have noticed this and when I notice something of this nature I feel compelled to babble about it until i have babbled myself out.
Likewise, having regular readers can make some feel obligated to post, because they know that there are people who take the time, however short it is, to check whether they have anything to say. I have a couple of blogs in my news feed in which the writers will invariably introduce a new post after a long absence with some form of "Please forgive my lack of posts, life got in the way" Note: No one is in any way obligated to post to their blog, and "life got in the way" is a poor excuse, because if such a thing happened, you've been doing things with people you actually know, rather than devoting yourself to "What shall I write to others I only think I know and am unlikely ever to meet." (See the first part of this post)
Despite the fact that the above sections might be considered an attack on blogging, which would be a very odd topic for a blog post, I actually like doing this because my life is very slow right now and otherwise I would be very bored if I didn't have other, interesting, blogs to look at every few days. I also wrote this post so that you will be aware that when the time comes that I miss a post by accident, (which is sure to happen eventually) this is because for once life got in the way and I am not going to put any silly excuses in front of my return post.
Happy blogging!
