The Trouble with Blogs...

...is that it's a compromise.

The blog is the modern version of a diary or a journal. The electronic world has taken over this very personal experience and art of writing. There are various reasons why a person would want to keep one. Most people want to keep a record of their history, maybe as a legacy. Some would like to preserve their memories, and relive them over and over again. While others keep them as a collection of life lessons to be handed down to their children or children's children, and so on (if the lessons of that time are still relevant).

Whatever the reason is, journal and diary entries are very personal and, most of the time, private. This is where the dilemma of publishing your thoughts in a blog comes in.

Between a journal and a blog, a blog is more convenient. Typing on a keyboard is so much easier than handwriting your words. And they look so much better with those fancy fonts you use -- a far cry from your chicken scratch.

A blog can be anonymous. Yes, your writing can be called up with just a few strokes of keyword combinations, but you can always hide behind a pseudonym (or pseudo-name, as Id like to call it) and fictional names of your characters. Not like a journal lying around can be traced directly to... you.

A blog is handy. You can pull out a new page and make a new entry virtually anywhere you are. You don't have to lug it around in your bookbag, and you don't need to carry a pen with you everywhere.

So why should this be a difficult choice? Because for all the same reasons as above, for all the convenience it brings, a blog is so blatantly "out there". Once you put your thoughts, your ideas and your feelings into an entry, they become public knowledge. Would you really put your most intimate secrets and most important opinions on a public site? Without getting paid for either?

What is the use of keeping an online chronicle if you hold back, anyway? So the way I see it, you do not hold back. And the fact that you don't hold back should be justified by either (a) because you are being paid for your writings, or (b) because you, as a diarist, have no sense of privacy or no respect for the art of writing at all.

I am neither. That is why I still keep a journal and a pen on a night table by my bed everynight.