Friends, strangers, and Net people

Maybe because I’m not a photographer myself, the moblogs I’ve seen haven’t interested me much. But when it’s a friend’s moblog, and you know the people in the pictures, it’s a whole new story. I don’t think it’s so easy to meet someone in real life that you only know through blogging. If there’s time and opportunity, you may become acquainted, maybe even friends. But it still takes time. I’ve had people walk up to me and know who I am through a weblog. Hanging out with them always feels like a first date. There’s the attraction and the shared interests, but there’s also, of course, the awkwardness. However, meeting someone familiar through a weblog is—hopefully—not the same as meeting an author of a book you’ve read. (The other day I was reading stuff on J.D. Salinger, an author famous for the way his readers felt like he was their friend.) Last year, at some lecture, Ville and I were talking about blogs and web journals. We had noticed that if you see a friend many times a week, it’s better not to read their blog or web journal. Otherwise they’ll constantly be telling you things you’ve already read. This was a positive discovery: it shows that what you write is what you’d share with your friends anyway. And that, I think, is a nice thing about blogs and public journals. Postscript
Since Janne answered this entry (which was an answer to his) on the same day as his original post, and his weblog has only daily permalinks, I’ll just tack my reply here. It gets confusing, I know. Janne’s friends have wondered about the varying “intrestingness” of the stuff he posts. Janne says it’s because he needs the space to write whatever he feels like. Otherwise writing becomes affected, constrained; a chore. I couldn’t agree more. I think Janne got it head-on. These are weblogs. We don’t have editors. We’re not being paid to write. Not everything’s going to be great, or super-interesting everyone, all the time. That’s what you get with weblogs. And that, I would say again, is a good thing about weblogs.

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