The reason why bloggers blog

According to Technorati, an internet search engine for searching blogs, the company is currently tracking 104,6-million blogs and more than 250-million pieces of tagged social media. There are certainly blogs that are written by employees of companies trying to put a good spin on their organisation and products or services they offer.

There are political commentary blogs that support candidates vying for voters. You can find blogs on every topic you can imagine. There are many blogs that are written on behalf of people or organisations for some kind of spin-off, whether money or power, or both.

What I want to rather speculate on is why ordinary folk, like myself, pick up the digital pen and write a blog. My younger daughter had tried for years to get me going on my own blog. It was only at the beginning of this year that I took the plunge. My main objections had been that number one: Why anybody want to read what I wrote? Number-two objection: What could I write that was of any value to anybody? Third objection: only people with huge egos actually write blogs.

Listening to a talk on TED by Mena Trott, co-founder of Six Apart, a start-up that has successfully developed such products as TypePad and more recently Vox for bloggers, I started considering a whole new vista of reasons why people blog. One of the main reasons, she says, that people blog is the quest of human beings to create a history of themselves and who they are, with other words, a kind of footprint in the sands of time.

I suppose one could equate this to the Bushmen’s paintings on rocks, or the hand-painted urns of ancient Greece, the wonderful tapestries of the Middle Ages, portraits painted by Rembrandt or even the films created by Hollywood, Bollywood and other famous film regions. Human beings want to be able to see where they came from, and they would like to pass a bit of their existence on to others.

This passing-on of one’s history used to be easy when people lived in the same village for generations and where one could trace ones family back for hundreds of years just by reading through the church registry. My father’s family managed to trace the origin of their surname right back to the 800s. Of course it ended up being a bit of a let-down. The person with the first surname such as his had been a hay stacker. No knights on white horses and beautiful damsels were apparent in our family.

With our personal blogging efforts we present to our families and to the world a sliver of our history. We carve into the digital world a part of our existence; to a certain extent we are trying to create a smidgen of immortality. We have existed and here is proof of this.

Does that mean that the blog has replaced the church registry then, or the church graveyard stone, one can wonder? Probably not entirely, but it has allowed people to leave something of themselves behind. It could be a reason for the popularity of scrapbooking as well, which up to now had eluded me. Scrapbooking is a similar effort by people to leave a memory of themselves and their families behind.

And finally, on this topic of personal history, we hope that somebody will actually read our blog. And such is the long tail theory that there will be somebody out of the millions of internet visitors who will be touched by your blog and in whom the content will resonate. They might even leave a comment to tell you that they have read and have understood where you are coming from. When that happens, then it is truly a visit to blogger heaven.