"Why Do You Blog/Read Blogs? La Shawn Barber asked her readers last week. We were going to add our own two cents' worth to her comments section but decided to post about it instead -- as we have here so many times before -- and then backtrack to her post. Scrolling through our "Blogging" category, we picked up the gist:
We blog because of the importance of being noticed.
We read blogs to gather others' posts as raw material for our own cogitations.
Egad. That's so "all about me." Yes, but individual voices are what make blogs interesting. Our own favorites come straight from the hearts and minds of "oners" who make us think and feel sad and laugh. Some are young, but all are young at heart. Each in her or his own endearing way wants to leave this world a better place. We mostly preach to the choir but now and then break through to someone on "the other side."
"Why are more and more people getting their news from amateur websites called blogs? Because they're fast, funny and totally biased," subheaded a Time Magazine piece on blogging this week. Not a bad article, albeit somewhat frozen in amber by blogging standards. Gushing at the notion that "Iraqis have blogs," the authors seem unaware of the dozen or so vibrant Iraqi bloggers currently posting daily from the front, linking only to the virtually defunct Where is Raed?, Salam Pax's blog that burned brightly for a couple of months as bombs were dropping over Baghdad last spring.
When the going gets tough, bloggers get blogging. That is the difference between Salam Pax and today's Iraqi bloggers. As we noted back in May, citing The Australian:
Pax survived the war, but his blog has succumbed -- not to the authorities but to the terrible weight of becoming the virtual personification of Iraq. "As the world starts looking at your website, you get more and more weighed down with the responsibility of it."
Blogging is not for the faint of heart.
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