Metablog the third

or, happy birthday to my blog. One year ago today, the person who had just christened himself "Udge" said:

Hello, world. You know you're a geek when: Having created a brand-new squeaky-clean blog, you first look through all the Settings pages before typing a single word.

I was a late adaptor, I had been reading public-diary-thingies on the Internet (I hadn't even registered the word "blog") for nearly a year, before it occurred to me that I might play that game too. This was partly because I had tried to play a similar game a few years previously on my professional website, and found that wrestling with HTML, CSS, RSS, FTP and all the rest of them was just too much hard work. It took longer to debug the entries and crosslink them with the rest of the site, than it did to write the words; plus needing four separate programmes to write, debug and post the damned things - what you might call "a serious cost/benefit imbalance". Naturally, it didn't last long; I stopped updating the site several years ago (without actually admitting to myself that I had done so).

I don't remember what prompted me to click on that big orange B in the early hours of August 20, 2004, nor which blog I had been reading; but I did, and from the start I loved it. Getting immediate positive feedback (my first comment was waiting when I came home from work that day) was probably a major factor in the "feel-good-ness" of blogging.

Blogging and the reading of blogs has become a significant part of my life; as Tim Bray said on the occasion of his blog's birthday, "it scratches an itch that I didn't know I had." Blogging has taught me things about myself and my life that I didn't know before I started, and has introduced me to some great new friends - even if we never meet.

Apart from how amazingly easy blogging is, the most obvious difference to a static website is the presence of comments on a blog. I published a link to my e-mail address on every page of my website but in all these years I have had just one (1) response. The reason why is obvious: it's just too much bother to change to a different programme and type in a response to something that you can no longer see because it's back in the first programme. I know this is true because I do it too: neither Sass nor Mimi allow comments, both say that they love e-mail (and I can confirm that they read & reply to messages, even if in Mimi's case the reply comes two months later ;-) BUT it is just too much effort to write an e-mail reply unless the post is something that got me particularly worked up. (This is probably why bloggers who don't allow comments get large amounts of hate mail: responders are more likely to go to this kind of effort to say "that was appalling" than to say "that was pretty good.")

Lioness once said words to the effect of "let me know whether I can play with the big kids". Well, part of the joy of blogging is that there are no big kids. We are all amateurs here, we are all just making it up as we go. A good blog is a personality (not necessarily a person, Udge is not all of me) and the most trivial pieces are often the most interesting. My pieces about doing the laundry or flowers or the sound of car tyres in the rain get many more comments than the earnest, important, change-the-world ones.

Bloggers who disable commenting are depriving themselves of a great joy. The community that develops around a group of bloggers exchanging comments, is what makes all this worthwhile; or rather, what makes it better than just writing in a book that you hide under your mattress. When I see e.g. Late Edition leaving a comment on Sleeveless in Southern Utah, or DM commenting on the Blue Sloth, I feel a sort of happiness to think that I probably brought them together, Late probably picked Heather out of my sidebar or from comments that she left here. This must be how matchmakers feel on seeing a prospective pair hit it off together.

The world is full of wonderful, interesting people, and I am so very happy to be a tiny leaf on the tree, a fly on the wall of this marvellous worldwide conversation.

Thank you all.

Other Metablogs: first second fourth