Developing Usable Experiences

Why Blog? The subject of a lecture…

November 19th, 2007 7:40 pm —  470 views

twilight_on_campus.jpg

The lecture I attended this afternoon in my CSCW1 class focused on Blogs and Wikis. Two web applications I fell in love with when I learned what they were.

We discussed why people blog and why blogging has become so popular. We talked about wikis and how people use them. Wikipedia is always an interesting topic. I think that understanding why it is so popular could lead to the building of applications that can better cultivate user interaction. Which, being a student studying HCI2 is phenomenon worth studying.

But the discussion on blogging got me thinking about why I blog. A few years ago the term “blog” seemed strange and kind of silly. Now it almost seems a household word. At least in this house it is. The worldwide “blogosphere” is fascinating to me. Who reads what blogs and why, who responds via comments to blogs and what sort of blogs inspire comments…there are so many interesting questions that come up when you start thinking about the underlying motivation to put to type one’s thoughts and feelings on any number of topics.

Part of why I started this blog was to force myself to write. The fact that others read it is an incentive of sorts, but is that the real reason? Is this an exercise in vanity? Perhaps in a way it is. But there are other reasons, others incentives that motivate me to blog. I’ve always been interested in keeping a diary but something about writing things down that only I would ever see felt…well…empty for some reason. Growing up I read a number of novels based on diaries and I found them personal and intimate. They made me feel more human and connected. The thoughts in those books could at times easily be my own voice in my head. Reading has always been a serious pastime of mine and I’ve long thought that someday my head was going to split open and spill out stories that would reach into peoples lives and make them feel more connected to the world. This hasn’t happened yet, but blogging is good exercise for my mind, my hands, and my sense of who I am in the world. Regardless of who reads it.

So I blog. And I don’t have any real good reasons other than I can, it’s easy, and it captures my history in a personal and impromptu way. Which I don’t think is a bad thing.

Image: I took this picture walking back to the parking garage after class tonight. It’s getting cold, the leaves are falling off the trees like large ocher colored snow flakes, and night seems to come so early.

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  1. Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW)…I have a hard time remembering it too. [↩]
  2. Human Computer Interaction (HCI)…yeah, there are a LOT of acronyms to remember [↩]

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