“Just another wordpress.com weblog”

This is a good statement that leads to an even better question: where are we as a society to find value (if any) in the blogging phenomena? Millions of people everyday all over the world plugging away at keyboards, detailing everything from their deepest sexual secrets to the quality of the tuna sandwich they had for lunch. If we are to assume that there is meaning in the liner notes of other people’s lives, as I am doing by starting this blog, what is it? Is there any point to being another drop in the millions deep bucket of online journals?

Let us first seek value in the expertise of amateur, starting with Wikipedia.com. Straight from the user written pages of the ultimate do-it-yourself site, we find: “Most commonly an amateur is understood to be someone who does something without pay or formal training.”

That’s a perfect definition because ideally that’s exactly what blogging is about. It continues, “The word comes from French, and can be translated as ‘lover of’, reflecting the amateur’s motivation to work as a result of a love or passion for a particular activity.” Yep, there’s a lot of that going on. Hopefully the rest of this blog will be an exploration of what’s important about people writing about what they love for free.

First, a caveat, which is that the Internet is a veritable goldmine of amazing truths and boring fabrications. There is so much that is the same out there, that here, the focus will be on things that standout for some reason and thereby enrich our understanding of the potential of the internet, and personal online journals. That is not to say, however, that there is not a value in the seemingly arbitrary ramblings of folks that could be classified as ‘nobodies’. On the contrary, I believe that often these are the fastest way to read our cultural pulse, but like everything in life, it’s important to strike a balance.