I like my blogging. It's a huge release for me, and as well as that it serves a purpose. I have two weblogs here, Impressions of Insanity and the Symptom Diary. Although these are both daily weblogs, there are very different reasons for having them.

Impressions is a place for me to get stuff out of my head that would otherwise make my brain explode, or at least that is what I feel like sometimes. Weird shit, emotional stuff, personal feelings. I say things there that I can't say to people. Wiring, maybe. It's not so much that I'm afraid of saying certain things to people, it's almost like I feel I have no right to express certain feelings, that those feelings are my problem, not anyone else's, so I keep them quiet. But the pressure does build up and I can release that pressure by posting to the weblog, by writing things down for some hypothetical anonymous reader. Of course, the blogs are read mainly by my friends, so I'm not sure what's going on there. As I described it in one of my posts, a "vicarious conversation".

It has become almost a duty, almost an obligation, but an enjoyable one. I don't like not updating my blog regularly. This keeps me writing, and I do think that my writing quality has improved as a result. I can explore not only my emotional state but ways of expressing that state. The loading of my words, the art of impression, has improved, become greater, more capable of subtlety.

The diary, on the other hand, is simply a convenient way to track symptoms and other factors regarding the illness I am fighting. I tried to keep one on paper but it didn't work, especially as I have trouble with my handwriting these days. This now has a companion database, and maybe one day I'll have worked out a management programme for it.

There are a lot of blogs out there. Have a look at Blogger.

Personally I feel; that a good weblog is not just some witty quip appended to some link or the other. They should be more than a place to point at other people. That is almost lazy plagiarism.

"Hey, look at this, it's so cool, and I'm so cool for pointing it out to you that I don't need to do anything other than turn it into a hyperlink. Hey! I'm cool enough to do html and have a website!"

Read Julie Petersen's theory on the web. I like this. I was pointed to this by Derek Powazek, and I agree with him that weblogs are at their best when they are personal utterances, when they are the descriptions of what is happening on the farm by the farmer, not when they are people pointing to a farm saying "look what that farmer's doing."

An analogy then.

Imagine a webcam. Now imagine a webcam that someone has set up to view the output of someone else's webcam. There's the difference.

These weblogs are my records of what is happening on my farm, and it's a funny farm. Read Andy's blog and find out what's happening on the farm next door. Read Yvaine's blog and there's another description of a different farm in a different place. All people, all expressing themselves.

The web should be about expression, communication. If you're going to indulge in navel gazing, at least gaze into your own navel, and not the navel of the web itself. That kind of spoils it.

At least, I think so. Go on, gaze into my navel. I've picked out all the fluff and the saline gel came out in the bath.