i’ve just finished reading marco’s tumblr post on blogging with an audience, and it made me think about my own blogging habits. particularly, in which he wrote:

We’ll see more complete people blogging their whole lives, not just trying to emulate magazine columns or news sites. Some of them will get large audiences, but most won’t — and it won’t matter.

and as such, now have i seen the blogging life cycle?

i started to keep a livejournal in 2001, which arguably, is not a blog. i wrote it for me. i wrote it for friends online, most of whom i didn’t know at first but some eventually became my friends in real life (and still are, you all know who you are—thank you always). i wrote freely in it and often, sometimes on more days than not.

so what happened? after nine years of more or less detailed scrawls of the highs and lows that comprise my life, the idea of having all of it available online to prying eyes is just a little too uncomfortable for me. i can look back at it and see how much i’ve grown and i can learn from my neurotic patterns, but how about the casual passerby? most of all of this has been locked down now, with sparse entries visible to a trusted few, and in the case of the last few years, i’ve only posted mostly impersonal entries on a completely different site.

perhaps this is what happens after years of oversharing. this is the third incarnation of a sort of blog i’ve kept, and i barely write in it. what i do want to do is share things that i liked and a few things that i’ve made, and that’s all that is here now. i’m not a blogger.

(unless, of course, we’re saying a blog is just a log kept on the web.)