mojotooth's Journal: is this thing on?

So I'm considering starting my own little blog here. I'm fully aware that probably nobody will ever read it. That's okay with me.

So what's a blog anyway? I haven't really read a whole lot of them, but I'm aware of the concept. It confuses me a bit, I must say.

Here's how I perceive blogs. A Blog is somewhere between a diary and a James Joyce novel. It's like a diary in that it's no good if you don't jot down your thoughts on a regular basis. In otherwise, provide content.

But it's not private like a diary. If it were, there wouldn't be much point in its existence, relative to an actual diary or perhaps at most a collection of private text files I keep somewhere safe. Unlike a diary I have to be pretty careful what I say here. I'm pretty sure what I say can and will be used against me in a Court of Public Opinion.

Maybe the whole stigma of "you never know who will read this" doesn't matter to some people. Well, it sure as hell matters to me. I make pains to be easy to find on the Internet, to be easily found and easily identified. So I must step carefully if I happen to espouse on my feelings on, say, the Iraq war. Or the RIAA. Or the topic of having children, or training dogs for agility competition, or hockey, or the excellent Tribes series of games. Anything that can be used against me in some way, I suppose.

Another thing: does this journal HAVE to be geeky? It's being hosted on Slashdot after all, the original Ancestral Home of the Geek. I'm a geek, but I'm kinda an in-between geek. I'm the geek from high school that was Captain of the Academic Team but somehow managed to be on good terms with the Captain of the Basketball Team. I'm the geek that would spend three hours playing Doom 2 and then three hours at the gym shooting hoops and lifting weights. Is that good? I didn't say that. It's just decidedly "fringe" geek.

Right now I'm guessing I won't find this to be worth my time. I tried the whole "hitchhiker's guide" Internet site at one point, where you can keep a blog on whatever interests you. It didn't really interest me in general. So we'll see. At least there's one rambling entry in here, right?