So, You Ask, What Has Blogging Done For Me?

Blogging is not like Wonder Bread. While it may come wrapped in pretty balloons, it does not "help build bodies twelve ways."

I have been doing a blog of some sort for almost a year now. My first two blogs were fairly personal, introspective sites. I was not intending to write for any audience other than myself. But I knew I was writing in a public forum. I found the act of making my thoughts visible almost hypnotic. Something about constructing my thinking in a public realm--the blogosphere--leant the act of writing some integrity for me. The writing became more real than the writing and the presence I normally compose in a moleskine journal. Something about this blogging made my thinking more real, gave it more weight.

I have always been attracted to the archival function of a blog. Plus there is something almost exhilarating about the instantaneous publishing that a blog offers. You click a button and your writing is out there. Accessible.

I also learned that what I thought was not necessarily accessible to others was absolutely accessible to others. I made assumptions about how I had set up my blogs' settings. I discovered that anyone who is curious about you can uncover you in the blogosphere unless you clearly indicate that you do not wanted to be posted on search engines. I had been previously been reading blogs that were secure and had assumed that mine was too.

I know, it's a terrific and naive assumption. Writing about personal ideas in a public realm yet expecting them to remain inaccessible.

But I have learned how to make adjustments. And not all of my writing was personal.

So between January and August I kept two blogs, both of which are powerful records of my thinking during that time--thinking that I was not able to formulate i any other forums. I have closed those blogs down and saved their contents.

I now have, by last count, five blogs, each for different purposes. Some are public and some are not.

Most of my writing this year has been in the blogosphere. My moleskine is still around, and I go to it occasionally, but not in the same way that I go to these blogs.

Blogs give me a way to play with voice and identity. Blogs give me a way to practice thinking like my students and peers. Blogs give me a sense of awareness across time. There is something about constructing a memory across time, the archival function, that is diffferent than a journal. Hard to explain. But I am surprised at how often I look back at what I have writtten and have already, in such a short time, forgotten what I wrote. I'll have to think more on this.

So, I return to my question: What has blogging done for me?

It has opened up my own thinking about the private/public realm.

It has made me think more of audience and voice. A blog implies a reader, and the awraeness of a reader--absent from the moleskine--influences what I write. It changes my awareness as I am writing.

A blog's visibility makes me feel as if my writing is more visible, as if it somehow has more integrity or purpose.

A blog has invited me to thinking differently while writing, about writing.

Bloggging has shown me a new way of dispersing text, of publishing, making thought visible.

Blogging has given me an energy, a vitality, a spark.

Blogging is fun.

Blogging gives you a chnace to create an identity, a substrance, a character.

Blogging gives you a voice, an authority.

When blogging, I write in shorter sentences, more one sentence paragraphs. More lists.