Been thinking about blogs lately. There's a certain stigma, I think, that comes with being a blogger. I've been meeting a bunch of new people recently and I always wonder if I should bring up the fact that I have a blog, or if that is like too much personal information for a new friend. Especially because then they might want to check it out. Not that I think everyone I know is just dying to read my blog - I have plenty of friends who don't check in, or if they do it's only once in a while when they think of it or I have a new layout. But those who do - I wonder if it sort of throws things off balance. Right now I think my readership is about 35% actual friends, 45% marginal/online friends, and 30% ghost readers whom I don't even really know. I'm okay with that, mostly because the people who are close to me who do read it, wouldn't have to read it to know what's going on with me because we talk on a regular basis.

Anyway, I've been reading several blogs pretty regularly - I suppose I am part of their ghost reader percentage because I don't think they know that I read them, or if they do we've never mutually acknowledged it. And I've started to wonder what makes a good blog and what makes a bad one. I can recognize them almost immediately.

Lisa is a good blogger. (If she wasn't, do you think I would host her?! Haha) Rachel can make anything inane seem insightful and interesting. Heather... well, Heather makes a living being a blogger.

Out of those three, I only know Lisa personally. Even her - I've never met. We've been friends for seven years (in fact... I believe our anniversary is tomorrow? (Yes we have an anniversary)) but as we met online and live in different countries, we've never actually been in each other's physical presence.

Yet I can appreciate each of those blogs in relation to how well I know them or don't know them.

Then there are the bad ones. (And no I am not going to link them, come on that's just mean...) I'm not sure what makes them bad, as I think most people tend to blog about similar topics - something funny that happened, a world observation, personal trauma or revelation, etc. Maybe it comes down to simple writing ability. MANY MANY people who can't write still have blogs. And even though I'm sure they can talk like normal human beings and form relatively grammatically correct sentences, for some reason when translating their ideas in a written forum it just all gets lost. That's the first thing.

The other is, I think, a lack of self-reflection. (Which is ironic because... they are writing in a blog which is all about self-reflection, I think.) I hope that I don't come across as self-centered or hypocritical in my blog. If I do, I'd love to know, because I think I have a high level of paranoia of being a hypocrite. Reading someone's personal thoughts while knowing who they present themselves to be offline can be rather jarring if they actually indicate very different people. I'd like to think that my blog represents me well - that someone who read it on a regular basis could come away with a pretty good idea of who I am. There's nothing on here that I wouldn't say out loud.

I'm not sure where all this was supposed to lead, but it's almost 8:00 and America's Next Top Model is on, so I'm out.

Let me know your thoughts, please. Doesn't matter which percentage you fall in. :)