Pages

Monday, July 26, 2004

2. How did you get started?

My first experience with blogging was the LiveJournal community. I had been stalking the blog of very cute guy who I found on the internet, and developed a crush on. I am quite sure that this is a very common experience. You are randomly googling for "The Bridges of Madison County" or "The Matrix" when you find the blog of someone who has the same interest as you.

I think if somebody puts Google and blogging together, it may be the future of matchmaking sites. You look for porn star Jenna Jameson and you find the blog of somebody who thinks they look like Jenna. It may be true love until you find out she has yet to complete her gender re-assignment surgery.

(As a side note, Google has actually purchased Blogger. If Google is smart, it will create some kind of tool to do matchmaking. After all, blogger profiles already contain a lot of information about them. All they have to do is provide a tool to accomplish this.)

LiveJournal is a unique blogging experience primarily because of the tools that it provides. I think that as of yet, there are no other blogging sites that offer the kind of experience that LiveJournal has, which is the “friends” network. It is like a cross between Friendster and blogging. Your friend network can read your blog entries automatically and easily through the Friends’ Entries feature. I think that some new tools like Kinja are replicating this, but it is not integrated like LJ.

I got started the way pretty much everybody does, I guess. I looked at a few blogs, figured out which ones really appealed to me and decided to sign up with the same service. I eliminated the ones that required a fee because I wasn’t sure where this blogging thing was going to end up. I read up on HTML and CSS so I have some rudimentary skills in creating a website.

I was always interested in the look of my site in addition to the content. I felt that I wanted my blog to be an experience to my visitors, that they would experience my projected personality, not just my words.

This is the reason why I decided to go with Blogger rather than LiveJournal, even though at that time, almost every blog I read was from LJ. With a free Blogger account, I could design my blog template with much more freedom than with LJ, which required a paid, premium account to use more than the basic provided templates. That and because I am very, very cheap.


NEXT: Just another manifestation of my mediocrity


previous question back to no milk please next question

3 comments:

Crystal said...

Did you look at xanga.com its suppose to be one of the best blog sites, the only reason i dont use it is cause i know to many people that have blogs there and i just prefer people whom never ment me to know my life then people that i see all the time and people whom live right next to me! you should check it out!

No Milk Please said...

thanks for the comment crystal. i didn't find out about xanga until i started with blogger. one thing i don't like about xanga is that it is closed to non-xanga members, which i thought was very restrictive in terms of responding, commenting, etc. i do think that xanga itself has a great community though. one day, blogger will figure out how to do this as well (i hope).

Anonymous said...

Thank you! Jenna is so hot ;)