Patron of a Blog

Consistently maintaining a blog takes work … real work. You can quit your job and devote every waking hour maintaining and being a patron of the blog. Some people have made it a career while others a recreational habit. Where do you negotiate how much time you devote to your blog? What do you put in your blog—discuss? It’s an interesting dance around privacy, really. Where you stand on how much information you expose to the hungry, salivating public? Whether you use an alias—Miss Luscious Luka—or your real name. What identity you present?

In a world where we feel distant, isolated and removed from social communities, we’re starved for information. What can I learn today? What can I find out about other people? Casual internet scoping (a relaxed internet stalking, or information acquisition, as I like to say) where you peek around online to find out where that cute boy in class lives and what your professor’s main thesis is. It’s like a challenge of your internet intellect and ability to move across the subtle waves of the Web.

There’s also the sharing side of blogging—a compulsive need to share a piece, part, sample of yourself with the blogging community. Look at me, I’m blogging, I’m sharing. See what I can do. Blogs have an interesting diary affect that compels the patron to open up and tell all. A sharing black hole where thoughts, ideas and bits of the soul get sucked into an empty internet void.

And there’s the illusion of secrecy. Although it’s on the internet, open for public viewing and reading, the idea of outsiders perusing your inner thoughts, and actually caring, is a distant idea. Who would want to read my silly, little blog? There’s nothing even there. But a characteristic of the blogging community is that we do want to know, desparately—to connect, or feel the illusion of connecting.

So here’s to my blog readers—feel connected. I’m reading, and hope you are , too.