As a society,are we becoming addicted to creating blogs?

[Lady Freedom]

Seems like we all have blogs anymore.Sure, not all of them look a pro as DU does, but their blogs none the less. Yahoo 360, Myspace, Livejournal / Blogspot, Xanga, etc, give us the tools to build places to give our two cents about anything and everything. even I have a yahoo and myspace blogs. But are we becoming addicts to this kind of stuff? Many people spend so much time working on their blogs that they seen to forget to cheek on blogs they belong to. I haven't been on DU or some others that I like because of all the monitoring of my blogs. Anyone else have this problem?

[sendero]

1. A lot of blogging..

.. is just the modern equivalent of the "personal pages" everyone (well, not me) put on the web in the 90s.

Nobody reads them so they aren't hurting anyone.

[idgiehkt]

2. one thing that freaks me out

young kids with no boundaries doing them. Putting all kinds of shit all over the place on the internet, then even putting up their IM addresses. I've been to two different blogs that belong to friends of mine lately one is just of age and one is a minor, and they 'blog' like we used to write in a journal and hide it under the mattress. i dont' think this is a good thing. Got bulimia? blog about it. sexually assaulted? tell all of cyber-space. It's so not good. I mean, once they are of age that's fine but these kids are putting some really super personal shit out there and it's too weird. end of rant.

[ForrestGump]

4. On a pracical level for thos eof us who ARE of age,

I'd be a little concerned about employers (not to mention people you know personally, whether on good terms with you or the kind of person who'd use such intel to hurt you) finding some of those innermost thoughts and feelings. That's basically why I don't post pictures of myself here -- not all of me, anyway -- and have tried not to give out information that pins me down too easily. I used to live in a very specific place and do a very specific thing...as it is, over the last couple of years and probably partly because I have taken a break from my 'real' career and because each month I give less and less of a f*** about human games, I've relaxed my guard a bit and posted enough stuff that someone who knew me would recognize me. But, still...I've heard that some employers check people out online -- some certainly used to on UseNet -- and I'd always be a little wary of that even if, like now, I'm not really (currently) employed by anyone other than myself.

The world has become a lot smaller with the communications innovations of the last ten or 15 years...if we were in the Sace Age, it's now global communications that to a very great extent define our time.

[idgiehkt]

5. Markos said that at Yearly Kos

He said they will google you. There is a very successful, extremely hated attorney that has my same legal name and you wouldn't believe the stuff people say about her online. So if anyone thinks we are the same person I'm screwed, lol.

I'm in such a mess right now there's no way I'd post a pic online. No way. Maybe in six months or a year, but not any time soon, lol.

A friend of mine gave me a link to his blog and I swear it freaked me out so bad, this kid is so young and there was stuff on there that blew my mind...this just isn't a good trend, I don't think.

[ForrestGump]

3. Nope

Don't like the concept for myself. Always seemed a stupid term but, then again, I was always averse to most InternetSpeak, LOL OMG OMG LOL LMFAOAROFLATUAEE!!!!

And I don't see how bulletin boards and general Web pages now suddenly (by many, anyway) seem to get reotroactively labeled 'blogs.' I mean, I've got Web pages dating back to the early '90s that concern my scientific work, that colelct togetehr links mostly for my own reference, and that discuss other interests of mine...I sure wouldn't call them 'blogs' (not least because I haven't really significantly updated any of them in at least three years) but some would. To me, a 'blog' (damn, I hate that term) is a web-log, an online diary (itself hardly a new thing...people had those back at the inception of the first widely-used graphical browsers like Mosaic and the like, and probbaly before).

I pretty much ignore my MySpace page, which wasn;t my idea in the first place. Kind of bemused, in the last couple of days, to get invited to join some sex groups -- including 'cam' ones (don't have a WebCam and have absolutely no desire for one) -- on MySpace...not that I'm averse to the topic, but the idea of playing around on MySpace just made me LOL and LOL, OMG...