This blog has been up for awhile now. I've really enjoyed posting using blogger - even when I finally get my site up and running again, I will still use this place as the source for any blog I publish on my site... yeah, right :-)
I've been thinking about blogs in general for a while now. One of the things I wonder about the most is some of the people I've known and lost contact with (through every fault of my own) and the people I still keep in touch with.
I wish having a blog were mandatory. Out of the people I like and respect, only a few of them have a blog (not all of whom I link too - I keep meaning too...). I miss talking to some of the people I knew, I guess.
And there are those people who you thought were your friends, but turned out not to be. This only happened to me once, 6-7 years ago, when an interested thirdy party let me know what was going on (but I would say that I was to blame for that). From that point onwards, there was this massive gulf. I was helpful but never friendly.
You see? Elements of the past, looking backwards. If someone were to read this blog and understand the context, they would immediately be able to establish their relationship to the content and the author.
But blogs aren't a silver bullet here. Nor is Friends Reunited, email, post, or any other form of communication that requires effort. Unlike many of the other alternatives, though, with blogs, you have a lot more chance of finding people as at some point, Google will probably patiently spider the entries and add them to it's magical inner workings.
I'm not sure what I started this post for. I know, though, that this is one of the things blogs are really good for. You can put down any old rubbish, come back later, review it, wince and then continue.
Blogs, email addresses, telephone numbers, real addresses, they might all move or get lost. But blogs in particular, due to their nature and publishing mechanism, I think are a great way of keeping in touch, and maybe even rediscovering people.
I think this is why even most portal and content management solutions include some form of blogging component. For knowledge and thought distribution, blogs (and wikis) go a long way towards making information public, archivable, and accessible in ways that email and instant messaging don't, for example.
I think I'm going to edit this post or do a follow up in the near future when I work out exactly what I want to say. Apologies for the rambling nature of this one.
