Why do people blog?

For quite a while, I thought that blogs were a means of making people read your views and ideas or anything that you find interesting and suited for others to read. This would give you the reason why I included the tracker (at the end of the page) which would tell me how many people came to visit my site, the article which was most read etc. I wanted to make the blog famous and so tried to convince others to link to it and employed other ways which would satiate my motive.

Some posts later, I have realized that, more than anything, blogging acts as a means for the blogger to know what (s)he feels, what (s)he thinks and what are his/her opinions about various issues, or products or people, pretty much about anything. It brings his/her subconscious thoughts to the forefront and actually allows oneself to analyze them further and build opinions based on them. The topics on which one writes are something, about which one has thoughts in his/her mind and wants to pen them down. However, the incentive of the audience is always there, but what I want to stress is that, lack of a large audience would not spell doom.

This sort of thing is not new, for we had people writing their diaries (blogs are sometimes also referred to as online diaries) from ancient times. But the aspects which have changed are quite phenomenal. Previously, though the diary writing was not that of a secret affair, a conscious effort was made by the writers to restrict the contents to themselves. These days, one has become more open and wants – or atleast does not mind – others reading his mind in the form of the thoughts he wants to share.

Also, the convenience of doing all these things has attracted people towards it. Unlike before, when it was almost impossible to make available your daily accounts for others, blogs have overcome this aspect. You no longer need to bind together your ideas into a book to be published and made available, you can just post them at your convenience – in terms of size, time etc. - and others can ravish them.

What I increasingly find myself doing is that any situation I experience, in my mind I try to make it into a post for my blog, with the title and everything. Sometime I feel that by posting it, I would be able to refer to it in the future and may be learn, and thereby gain from it. But, I realize that the actual aim of writing is to make a permanent impression about it in the mind, so that you never have to refer to it, and it gets imbibed.