Blogging: Public Diaries; Secret Life?

70,000,000 blogs at the last count ...

My title feeds into the opinions of some journalists -- not bloggers themselves -- who, feeling the erosion of the monopoly on the publication of their personal views, seek to put down us bloggers in any way they can ... They're less their authors' secret diaries made public, shrilled one, than a new genre of writing that could be called Performance Diary (this is all my paraphrase; I long since tossed out the originals in the recycling ...) Blogs are beehives of attention-grabbing hyperbole. A trove of exaggeration. A tireless shriekfest of show-off ranting designed far less to confess than to impress :: with every point double-underlined and highlighted in shocking pink, the sincerity of the blogger is thrown into doubt.

Well I doubt whoever penned those points had ever read a genuine weblog like Ivy's... Deb's... Nicole's to name a random three (if you want more just look to your right!!) Blogs that tell life as it is for those living it; unphased by the demands of a journalist's editor.

Ironically it's newspaper columnists, in fact, who typify every showoff characteristic that our critics level at us bloggers. We write for our friends, but the whole world is welcome to partake. And those journalists who accused bloggers essentially of shouting at ourselves in the mirror, were leaving out of the equation perhaps the most vital aspect of the worldwide weblog as opposed to the locked and hidden "secret diary" -- interactivity.

The first thing I do each morning after logging on is to check my messages. Not my email but my commentary boxes. The friendships I have made and nurtured via "comments" are pricesless to me. It's this that has made blogging for me so worthwhile. Without comments I would be alone, whispering in the dark. It's you guys who make it all worthwhile. You who read my words -- whether I'm tiresome or entertaining. And you especially who feed back to me your support and friendship. Telling me I'm not the only one out there to feel this way. Guilding me from loneliness to entertainment; sometimes even joy. Telling me every day, in so many of your own words, that life is as wonderful as you are.

And because of you, even my bleakest days seem somehow worth the living.