I was tagged, twice - Why do I blog?

Since my last post I’ve been tagged twice. Matthew tagged me with the question “Why should you blog?” and Mark over at Me And My Drum tagged me with the very similar “Five reasons why I blog”. Since these two topics are pretty much the same, I’m going to take them both up on their tags with this post, and explain the most obvious reasons why I blog. Hopefully my reasons are generic enough to be applicable to others as well, and give some of my readers a good reason or two to start blogging!

The first and most important reason why I spend time on blog is because I love the idea of being able to publish my own thoughts and ideas to the world. I’ll be the first to admit that I’m sort of selfish that way, because I actually belive that my opinions carry some weight, and can be found interesting by other people. Is that an outrageous thought? Maybe, but it’s the truth, and I believe that is one of the core fundamentals of why all of us spend time blogging. If we never meant for our opinions to be read and argued by others, we might as well password protect all of our post with an uncrackable password, or better yet just write a journal and keep it locked inside a box.

The second reason why I enjoy blogging in particular for voicing my opinions is because the nature of blogs and how they work makes it easy to start and participate in discussions, even on from your own “home” (your blog). That’s another selfish reason I suppose, because to me the biggest difference between blogging and participating in forums (which I also love) is that with a blog, you can do everything on your own terms, and the rules of others aren’t imposed on you.

Another thing that I enjoy about blogging is that you get to know people. Sure, there might be easier ways of making friends and acquiantances online, but I have found that through reading blogs and comments you quickly get a good and accurate impression of what peope are like in a much more profound way than a MySpace or FaceBook profile ever would.

So to summarize, I blog because I’m selfish and because it’s social. Now I’m going to pass this on to a few other people so that they can tell us all why they blog, and to see if they are as self-centered as myself. My choices are Mike, Malin and Menguzar.