Why blog?

I haven't been posting as often lately. Work has been way too busy to spend time blogging as often as I'd like.

Something that I've thought about though is what's the point of blogging? Does a blog have to have a specific purpose? For example, should a political blog be exclusively political and never about anything else? Techincally, the blog's owner dictate's the topic. However, in the interest of the reader, it generally helps to keep the same general theme.

I haven't generally gone outside of politics, current affairs, and some Christianity and personal story posts. I try to stay as far away as possible from the 15-year-old MySpace blog types. You know how they go... "Michael looked at me today, but I didn't look back, because I'm playing hard to get, but I like him so much and it's so hard. What would you do?" And then the comments run something like, "Oh Bethany, I so totally feel for ya. Life just sucks sometimes, huh?" Except it wouldn't be spelled correctly and there would be countless acronyms like "bff" or...ah, I don't know them, so I'm not even going to try.

Anyway, that's what I don't want this to be. But I do have a number of family and friends who read it, and they like to see more than, well, dry politics. So I've tried to mix it up as much as possible.

I came across the email I sent out to a number of friends when I first started the blog. It sort of sums up why I started this in the first place.

-----Original Message-----
From: Joey -------
Sent: Saturday, February 11, 2006 6:00 PM
Subject: New blog

Hey all, [what kind of a salutation was that?]

I've followed politics for a number of years now, and I often email stories that I find to friends. I also enjoy reading blogs (those that are political in nature anyway...not personal blogs that go "my name is...I like her but she won't look at me...I had such a bad day today"). As most of you know, I had a column when I was a student in college. I miss having that outlet, so I decided to create one.

If you like keeping up with state and national politics but don't have much time and want my digested version of world happenings, you might be interested in checking out the blog I started. It's called "Wide White," and it's at http://widewhite.blogspot.com/. Considering that politics is my job, I come across a lot of information over the course of my workday, so I figured I might as well help those who don't have the kind of job I h ave and don't have the time to follow things.

Hopefully it will be insightful, fun, and most importantly, time well spent. Let me know what you think!

Joey

So there it is. That's a bit of a summary of why I initially got going with Wide White. It's evolved somewhat in the last four months, though I think it's stayed fairly consistent.

Thanks for stopping by and keeping it going. I've loved the comments and the people I've been able to meet through this venue. I was somewhat nervous about the people I'd meet. I thought they might be a bunch of techie nerds who I'd never want to hang out with. Instead I found that they're a bunch of techie nerds that are actually cool to hang out with. Just kidding. There are a lot of really neat people that I've been able to meet through this, and they haven't been the weirdos that I thought they'd be. Well, not all of them anyway.

Here's to blogging...