Friday, August 20, 2004

Blog 101

It's like a rage.. so bleedin' hot at the moment and everyone is just doing it. I blog, you blog, she blogs, he blogs, and everyone is blogging. Damn the vastness of cyberspace! But that's another topic altogether.

So blogging is a culture. Why do people blog? For all sorts of reasons I presume.. wanting to share their stories with friends and family without having to email them individually (OK, so maybe they haven't heard about group email?), then there are those who want to key in these entries to look back on.

Within the blogging culture, we have various subcultures. Here are some that I've discovered...

Teenage years are filled with a lot of anger, hatred and rebellion. Their daily rantings are about friends, family, school, etc. This group feel that the world is against them and I suspect they feel damn good when they blog about their depression. Their young teenage years are filled with boys, girls, friends, school, parents, broken familieis, drugs, kisses, making out, sex... Here is one example of the many I've come across.


eVeR rEaD a 15 yEaR OlD SiNgaPoReAn gIRL'z BloGz? HoW iN tHe WoRlD dO tHeY tYpe LikE tHis? aNd tHeY tYpE anD tYpE and tYpE.. DaMnZ! AnD, wHy DoEs a "HAHA" hAvE tO bE tYpEd lIkE tHiS - 'HahaZ'. BeTtER sTiLL, "CoMe HeRe LaHz!" or "BeTtER gO dO My HoMeWoRk LeHz!" I call this the Act-Cute culture which is very prominent about young teenage girls in Singapore who are into Hello Kitty.If you find this cute, point your browser here. Don't say I didn't warn you though. I almost OD-ed.

Then there are the new-age contemporary female writers who reside in an metropolis cities all over the world. Being educated, cultured, well-spoken and well-read, they have strong opinions about world issues, politics, gender matters, etc. I love reading blogs from them. A nice one I came across is right here. And I guess she's a 30 something year old Chinese woman who is residing in KL. Married too!

Next we have them specialist blogs. I came across a few.. There was this one blog solely about web-blog design. All the entries in there are like notes your tutor will print out for you after a particularly boring lecture. Then of course, I saw this blog about dragonflies. Not in English, I couldn't decipher anything in there, except marvel at the pictures posted. It probably is a blog created by a wildlife or rather insect obsessed person? Or maybe an association like Green Peace, but they are fighting for dragonfly rights.

Finally, the incessant rantings about daily routines.. 9am I did this. 12 noon I ate that. 3pm I went someplace. 6pm I had dinner. 9pm I went to bed. These people are merely creating a timetable of their daily lives.. except they do it in sentences in a fancy thing called a blog. Here's one.

Of course, these are just the few that I came across today. A few were a good read, some were boring but with very well-designed pages, and well.. an array of writing styles, modes of expression and whatnot.

Oh, and before this entry ends, here is an awesome picture of the Great Wall of China which I found at Josh's blog.


Posted by Doreen at 2:43 pm