Hello and welcome.
In the late 1990's, I was a participant in a graduate course about the relationship between writing and computers. Interestingly enough, I don't recall the subject of "web logs" coming up. If it did, it failed to make a significant dent in my consciousness. The hot topic of the moment was how hypertext as represented by HTML and the WWW was going to change the writing game.
As budding scholars (in my case a scholar-poseur) we were all eager to identify what the coming things were in computer-based writing so we could go off and write articles, dissertations, conference papers, and maybe even a book or two. We weren't obtuse--we recognized that the web was a a means of democratizing writing, allowing people to publish their ideas so that anyone in the world with a computer and an internet connection could read them. It just didn't occur to us that the web would allow thousands of people to become daily/weekly columnists without being connected to an online magazine or newspaper. Oh well, so much for our careers as trend setters.
Now, almost ten years later, I find myself a frequent reader of blogs. Why? Because as someone who promoted journal writing as a college composition teacher, I love hearing the "voices" of people. There is something in each of us which only comes out when we are writing as opposed to speaking.
Today I move from observer to participant. I do so for several reasons: one, it is a wonderful way to practice my writing skills; two, I found myself writing in a journal which I saved online and began to wonder whether some of the things I wrote were worth sharing with others; three, as someone whose day job is concerned with communication and technology, it doesn't hurt to be active in the blogsphere; and four, it's a cool thing to list on your resume. :)
