When it comes to blogging, I am not afraid to say that I’ve been around the block a few times. In my time in the blogosphere, I have tried no fewer than four different blogging sites to establish myself. From my first feeble attempts at Xanga to my best and most formal intentions on WordPress, I have explored the major blogging communities in search of what network suits me best. In a story much like Goldilocks and her famed run in with the three bears, my blogosphere explorations have taken me through many extremes to find a home here on Blogger, which is, in my opinion, the most accessible and functional of the major blogging outlets.
My first brush with blogging came in my freshman year of high school. As we were all transitioning from being carefree big kids to self-aware and angsty teenagers, the trend of Xanga came into vogue. Xanga, the predecessor of Facebook and Twitter and all the other social networking sites that high schoolers and even middle schoolers are hooked into, was essentially just an online diary. Amongst my friends, our usernames were mostly Dashboard Confessional or Something Corporate song lyrics and the content of our posts were highly dramatic and personal; this was blogging before we fully understood that the world could see everything we were writing, so we were uninhibited. And in the contest to gain followers and e-props, no personal stories or embarrassing moments were safe from being exposed on Xanga. Many a catfight was had via those comment boxes, long before anti-someone Facebook groups and poking sprees were even a twinkly in Mark Zuckerberg’s eye. Alas, as with many of the trends of early high school, Xanga was simply a flash in the pan. Gone from our lives as quickly as it came, like MySpace I abandoned my Xanga and the self-indulgent, angst-ridden posting that came with it. My Xanga is still floating out in cyberspace somewhere, a relic of my first embarrassing attempt at blogging.
I did not re-enter the blogosphere for another five years. During my sophomore year of college, when I realized that I wanted writing to be a part of my life and hopefully my career, I decided to relaunch my blog persona. Long gone were the days of posting winter formal dramas and cafeteria hijinx—this time I was determined to start a serious, hard-hitting blog that would express my sophisticated views on music, politics, and literature. I wanted a blog format that would reflect this very grown up approach, and after researching the options in front of me I made the educated choice of WordPress. WordPress seemed to be the most refined of the options; it is a no-frills blogging site for adults who want to discuss their high-minded opinions and philosophies in Helvetica. I created my blog one lazy spring afternoon and spent the rest of the evening writing a post entitled “My Rules for Living;” clearly this blog was serious business, and no frivolity like what I had posted on my Xanga half a decade ago (“What a child I was!” I thought to myself) would suffice. Thoroughly satisfied with my beginning, I published the post. However, I had written myself a bit of a manifest that set a very lofty tone for my site. How could I follow up a post that purported to outline my outlook on life? I got too trigger-shy about to what to post next, intimidating myself out of ever posting again. Looking stupid on a WordPress seemed about the most humiliating thing I could do—not because I feared the community of bloggers it attracted, as they all seem like lovely people, but because the seriousness and sophistication of its atmosphere made me too scared to say something idiotic. And so, as I abandoned the Xanga, I left my WordPress blog to wash away into the annals of cyberspace.
Wanting to try again in a more informal setting, at the suggestion of a friend of mine from high school I signed up for a Tumblr. I pared down my Rules for Living, renamed them something much less manifesto sounding, and recycled it as my first post. Then, I started “Tumbling.” Now, the Tumblr community can be a little scary. In a completely different way than WordPress it is highly intimidating; rather than maintaining an air of superiority discourages stupidity and sometimes even posting, Tumblr is a haven for the passionately and illogically obsessed. The community of the “Tumblr famous” is dominated by high school students with an inexplicable amount of time to devote to curating blogs devoted to anything from a literary movement to a single TV show coupling. At any given time my dashboard could be covered with trolls arguing over the latest Glee relationship, the wedding of William and Kate, the religious undertones of Harry Potter, and just about any divisive or cult-inducing topic you could think of. The majority of the posts are reblogged photos, videos, and short quotes rather than thoughtful and original text-driven entries, but when people do create something of their own (a song, a short story, a photo edit) they protect it rabidly and troll after anyone who steals it without credit; in a twisted way that exists amidst torrent links and megaupload files, Tumblr may be the last place that rightful authorship is protected by the masses.
Unlike my Xanga and my WordPress, I still use my Tumblr. As bizarre of a blogging community as it actually is, it offers me the chance to discover beautiful photography, vent my pop culture obsessions, and even discover new music on a constantly self-renewing basis. However, Tumblr was not the proper forum for my true blog. And then I turned to the most popular site, Blogger, and I have never looked back. Blogger is popular for a reason; it offers simple yet highly customizable formatting options, an extensive community of bloggers, and an atmosphere that, because of its site diversity, doesn’t feel stuffy. If Xanga was too emotional, WordPress was too formal, and Tumblr was too crazy, then Blogger is just right.
Hey, can I get some kind of compensation for all my advertising?
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