Do Friends let Friends Blog?

by Steven Garrity

I started this weblog (three years ago this month) with friends. Over the life of this weblog, I’ve made friends and acquaintances through the web. Some of these friends from the web also became meat-space friends while others have remained connected only through the web.

Meeting people through the web and weblogs is nothing new. Weblogs are great at forming connections, and when geography or travel allows, solidifying these connections face-to-face is only natural. However, in recent weeks and months, I’ve seen the tide moving in the other directions. Real-world friends, family, and acquaintances are coming in to the world of weblogs.

It started a few months back, when my old friend and business partner, Dan James, started his weblog, CEOBlues.com (what a great name). Dan was a natural weblogger from day one. This was cool, but not really groundbreaking for me, as I already knew Dan in the digital sphere.

Then, more recently, my real-world friend Melda started a weblog. Also, my father experimented with a weblog of his own. Now, worlds are starting overlap. Another wise old friend, Ben Wright came out of the blue and is now a budding weblogger at the cleverly named Occasionally Wright (a TypePad powered weblog, on the recommendation of myself and others).

This blurring of worlds, real and virtual, is indicative of the beginning of a truly broad adoption of the web and of weblogs. We don’t think of ’telephone friends’ – we just call our friends on the telephone. So too shall it become on the web. I will meet friends from the web in the real world – I will meet friends from the real world on the web.

It’s all good.

 

9 thoughts on “Do Friends let Friends Blog?”

  1. For me, the main distinction between LiveJournals and Weblogs has mainly been that Weblogs are aimed at strangers, while LiveJournals are for your friends. If you look at the way LiveJournal has been designed it has a lot of clever features for helping groups of friends keep track of each other – things like the friends list (which aggregates entries from people who you have marked as friends) and the feature that allows you to post “private” entries that only your group of friends can read. I’m not surprised that the two worlds are merging more these days – as more and more people become comfortable using the internet the obvious benefits it can provide to real friendships (things like blogs and instant messenging) will only increase.

  2. Virtual/Reality

    As we integrate our on/off-line experiences, I see this as an expression of our desire to become *more* than we see ourselves now to be.

  3. I agree entirely as it appears to be similar to the mid-90’s move to email…sorry it was e-mail. I wonder, however, if blogs themselves will become obsolete over the next few years. Two reasons.

    As you have noted Steve in an earlier post, there is starting to be a number of trash replies showing up like in your Bill Gates’s house post. This may be a downside to Google as noise starts to show up like it did on usenet. It would take a lot of jerks with the time but, as we learned from usenet, they are out there. If my blog were to receive, say, 30 junk posts a day, I would lose interest. Email has now started seriously addressing spam in a way that usenet could not address flaming, spam and cross-posting. What will stop junk replies? Has to be automatic.

    The other reason might be RSS. If blog URLs need not be gone to but can have their content drawn to your reader, sooner or later people will stop prettying up the blog and will ust post content for syndication. This would not stop posting as junk replies might but it would shift the focus to “my site” as a receiving station rather than the broadcast studio. It might also be a way to distill not only the sites you want to see but the replies. There might be a way to pick replies you want to read by their source or author or topic rather than the blog into which they are posted. This would be exemplified by my finding your recent post on RSS at kottke – would I rather focus on what you have said where ever rather than your blog: content or authorship rather than location? URL becomes more of a medium or means than an end of a journey.

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