Re:Online Journals are asking for TROUBLE (Score 1)

For one thing you completely miss the point that a blog can be anything you want it to be or need it to be. Does it have to be your innermost secrets? No. Can it be? Sure, how brave are you?

I'll tell you how I use mine. It is a tool:

• 3 years ago my wife lost her mind, abducted our daughter, and was finally restrained and taken away by the police to the mental ward. When all was said and done I had full custody and her mother had been in and out of the mental ward several times before bolting into the wild blue yonder. Throughout this entire ordeal I have used the internet as a place to post public documents relating events which have transpired between the ex and I. If I ever find myself needing to spend another 10's of thousands on litigation with her I will have a very long, very documented trail with which to protect myself.
• I post fragments of my writing and even complete pieces. I am moving closer and closer to seeing writing as a sort of "open source" type of project. Increasingly I don't strictly believe in intellectual property and I use the web to think about this and to pass my work into something like public domain.
• I use it as a catch all note pad. When I learn a new idiomatic phrase, or a word, or a fact or whatever happens to strike my fancy I can post it. Now instead of having to find something, after the fact, in scads of paper journals, notebooks, scraps, of paper, etc. I simply post it and then use that handy search engine to find it when needed.

So frankly I don't give a damn whether anyone else finds value in it. It is my tool. It works pretty damn good and I have been doing it this way for 6 years with no apparent problems. (consistent backups - definately needed)

Hope this helps fill the hole in your understanding.