Hanging out on the front porch
Jordon elaborates on the best metaphor for blogging that I’ve read:
I wonder if the reason we create these blogs is not so much to fulfill the promise of personal publishing but as an online place to hang out on a front porch. Maybe that’s why so many people keep showing up and posting, we have loyalty to our community and our readers. Today I was at Market Mall and the place was packed with senior citizens drinking hundreds of cups of coffee. Why do they keep showing up? The uncomfortable chairs, the chance to chat with Wendy at Safeway? It’s because of their friends and it drives coffee rows all over the world. Maybe that is what this is. We keep showing up everyday because we know that everyone else does and it makes us feel a little less alone.
I was reading a review of the new iLife last week, and it said that software has now made it possible for anyone to bore the rest of the world. In a way that’s true, and many of the blogs I read (and write) are sort of boring in the same way that most of my conversations are boring. But they serve a bigger purpose, in that some of my strongest relationships today have been built over a series of relatively boring conversations.
