Wednesday 10 December 2008

Mind bloggling

It is always surprising to read messages from folk that say they enjoy reading your blog or in my case, diary, or even, to give it it's official, perhaps slightly ostentatious title, 'journal'. This is my 100th post and I never once thought I would get this far. The whole experience of writing life's thoughts, happenings, meetings and conversations has actually turned out to be more fun than I thought, even though I'm certainly not documenting anything particularly spectacular. Then again, that depends how you define 'spectacular' I suppose... Everyone's ideas of 'spectacular' are very different. The fact I've kept this up is spectacular in itself perhaps. Looking back, I reckon it was hitting the grand old age of thirty that did it. On the event of the birthday I think I panicked as I could not remember where the last thirty years had gone and what the hell I had done with them. There was school, school, uni then work. But what happened inbetween, and during, come to mention it? Where does it all go? Where did it all whizz off to? They say life is fleeting but this is ridiculous. In the beginning I reckon this was all an effort to try and document something... anything?! Together with the odd rant, review and other extraneous thoughts thrown in for good measure, of course, I discovered what this blogging thing is all about.
When I first activated my own website (www.reidnet.org.uk) I had the intention of using it as an online portfolio, which I still use it for, but also as a place for family folk and mates to hang out. I engineered a messageboard for it, with much difficulty at the time, which only a few folk ended up using, usually arguing. This made it considerably pointless. That's where I went wrong. It was not a messageboard I wanted but a proper writing blog. A much better, easier way of saying something online. Okay, Bebo, Myspace and all these other online communities are great at that but more often than not you get a whole bunch of emails from complete weirdos, who you don't know from adam, asking you to be their friends. People sitting at home, on their computers, jumping with glee when they hit the fifty friend mark (or whatever friend amount would make you jump with glee). I'm not particularly interested in what celebrity I may or may not look like, adopting a computer generated duck or what kind of alcoholic drink I would be. Well, okay, the alcoholic drink I'm curious about, but usually I'm quite happy to just sit and type. This blog has been great in talking to folk on other blogs, some on other countries, reading other peoples' writing, getting inspiration, ideas, motivation and generally gaining a better way of exploring the web. In short, I'm having fun writing on this journal, whether people read it or not.

1 comment:

Miriam Vaswani said...

Well done, Michael, on your blog centennial. Mazel tov.

It's a great blog, makes me laugh every time. Sometimes it even makes me think deep thoughts, though I try to keep those to a minimum as a general rule.