One corner of my research has me looking at a wave of blogging that started to build in the early 2000’s, in the wake of the dot-com crash and in the build-up to the Iraq war. In September 2000, blogger Rebecca Blood wrote a first draft of that new history in weblogs: a history and perspective.
What struck me was how simple and how powerful the basic premise was:
The blogger, by virtue of simply writing down whatever is on his mind, will be confronted with his own thoughts and opinions. Blogging every day, he will become a more confident writer. A community of 100 or 20 or 3 people may spring up around the public record of his thoughts. Being met with friendly voices, he may gain more confidence in his view of the world; he may begin to experiment with longer forms of writing, to play with haiku, or to begin a creative project–one that he would have dismissed as being inconsequential or doubted he could complete only a few months before.
Blogging for personal enrichment. What a concept.
