metablogging

it strikes me that metablogging is a phase that most bloggers eventually go through, if not something that preoccupies a lot of time for their entire career/life as a blogger.

developing a voice on your blog is essential. taking a voice that is unnatural for you can turn you off blogging pretty quickly.

for this blog, i plan on maintaining a fairly informal tone, but we'll see what happens.

an observation about online social networks: participating in newsgroups, blogs, forums etc. leads to encountering people with knowledge that you do not possess on a constant basis. no other social atmosphere has this property - where you could, with minimal effort, be faced with hundreds or even thousands of new ideas in a day of internet research. reading on the internet is very different from reading a book, where ideas are stretched over pages and chapters. the nature of the net allows time to be divided into split-seconds of attention, rather than minutes or hours like with a book. if you wanted, you could speedily review a webpage without even reading the text, and indeed this is a mechanism which people might employ to reduce "overload".

a characteristic i had not thought about before is that encountering so many new ideas through ones computer, each one put there by another human being, is that it gives a false impression of the intelligence of other people. you start to think that everyone knows everything about everything. when someone points out something you didn't know about your favourite subject, it can be a challenge for your ego. it's difficult to pretend you're an expert on anything, when 5 minutes of research on the internet will find someone who is more knowlegeable.