The internet – Community & Communication – Blogs and other social mediums (Facebook – Myspace)

I’ve been bitten by the blogging bug since February of 2010. It was reading Grognardia that inspired me to start up Grevious Injury. (It should have been Grievous Injury from the start, but that’s water under the bridge.) After poking around there I found many other blogs both in the OSR community and beyond that I followed thanks to the fun folks at Google. 

Blogging remind me a lot of chat rooms except you can never be sure who your audience is, or even if you have one.  Yeah you can track visitors to your site, but in the end you may put a lot of effort into your work that no one reads or appreciates. I guess that raises the question that Tenkar recently talked about, why does one blog? Why does one read blogs?

I read blogs because I seek what others have to say, what their experience is, what’s going on in their game/life and what they may have to share about things in general. For the most part it is a combination of entertainment and information that I seek. It is a time dependent reality for me. Summer is slower, had the recent attack on a fellow blogger happened during Lent or Easter I would probably have missed it or just glanced at a few of the postings or comments without having much time to reflect upon it.

Why do I blog? I guess it gives me a chance to babble about things that I normally don’t chat about in my daily conversations.  To be honest I don’t think I have a whole lot to say on blogs other than to indulge my ADD thinking patterns.  I don’t invest the level of dedication, talent and creativity I see in a number of the OSR blogs and on the some of the other blogs that I frequent.  I admire those who do invest their time and efforts to share with others.  I get irritated in verbal conversations when someone makes an asinine comment about others “having too much time on their hands.”    I can’t help but thinking I have found another swine to whom I will not throw the pearls. I try not to knock creativity even if I don’t completely get it or feel drawn to a particular expression.  

Finally, I think there is a real disconnect between what people think of as “anonymous” and its potential backlash in real life. The various Facebook-Myspace-Twitter dramas show a profound lack of good judgment regarding the nature of a social medium.  If you can’t stand behind your words, better to never put them into print. If you don’t want the world looking at your picture/post/comment, don’t post it.