A blog is a vehicle for personal communication published and distributed to an unlimited worldwide audience via the Internet. But the attractive and addictive nature of the blog comes from something else, perhaps the tingly feel of communication, or community. LiveJournal is based on community, and is thriving (except, of course, for its recent massive power failure!) But the appeal of LJ breaks down for me. It is a space for shallow personal reflections and day-to-day commentary largely intelligible only to my friends. Entries are often dissapointingly context bound to their time of posting. The greater potential for wider-appealing commentary loses out to the self-serving desire to talk about oneself. I refuse to feel guilty about this though. It is what it is, it's just that I do actually have things besides myself about which to talk. And LJ is not the appropriate environment for those things.

I'm a third-year at a small, left-leaning liberal arts college. I don't think that my ideas are revolutionary or brilliant, but I do think they're mostly interesting. I enjoy well-crafted statements on politics, culture, technology and society as well as other people's comments on my ideas. In the hypothetical Venn diagram of People Interested in My Life and People Interested in My Ideas, the overlap is fairly small. The logical solution is two blogs with two seperate concepts, styles and content, just by the same author. The topics will vary, but I'll try to keep it interesting.

Philip Greenspun says that the blog is the ideal format for the two paragraph idea. I've already exceeded that today, so I'll close by recommending my current reading: the CIA's "Mapping the Global Future" report, which is an analysis of what the world will be like in 2020. (Global Trends in 2010 and 2015 are also available. I've yet to investigate the humorous archive possibilities of "Global Trends 2000." Because, you know, the CIA never gets anything wrong.)