Blogger Revolution

Everybody wants to be a blogger, especially after they have children. If you're a woman, you're known as a mom blogger. I get the impression this means that you are somehow magically transformed into a much better blogger than any other blogger on the face of the planet.

I've been blogging since before blogging was cool. Since 2002! Back then, blogs were treated much the same way Facebook is now. Most people used them as social networking tools and hardly posted anything more than single sentence "status updates." The "like" feature didn't exist in those days, either.

In the beginning, I was reluctant to blog. An Internet friend of mine kind of urged me into it, saying essentially that "all the cool kids" were "doing it!" She gave me an invitation code, because back then you couldn't just jump to the site and sign up. Sorry, Google+, but your invitation only idea isn't original. Nothing is.

Blogging wasn't even known as blogging when I started doing it. I'm not even sure there was a term for this newfangled phenomenon. The top dog of blogging services back then was LiveJournal. When I started, I found that I couldn't stop, and for years I was posting something nearly every other day!

Back then, I felt special. I felt like I was important, like what I had to say had some kind of meaning behind it. Of course, I wasn't really posting about much of anything at all. At first I was sucked into the meme craze. I was taking online quizzes and posting the results on what kind of teenager I was or if I made a good girlfriend.

Then I started treating it like an offline journal. Before the digital revolution, I actually kept a collection of handwritten ones. Sometimes I still revert to "the classic." There's something very cathartic about picking up a pen and scratching words onto a piece of paper, something more personal about it. A girl can put a lot more feeling into what she writes when putting those thoughts into a notebook instead of on a screen. Plus there were some things I wrote off screen that I would have never dared to share with the public. Now, I don't care so much.

Sharing the most intimate details of my personal life with the entire world didn't make me famous, though. Nor did it make me any kind of special. Though it felt nice to share my innermost thoughts with my "circle" of friends. It felt even better when occasionally someone commented on what I had to say. My online life was my kind of social circle of friends. I had, and still have, more online friends than I do real physical bodies to interact with in real life. I'm only famous amongst them.

What's funny? When I became a mom, I actually started blogging a whole lot less. Oh yeah. That's right. I'm a mommy now. I already fail at being a mom blogger, because I haven't been blogging about it since the moment my baby was born. Shame on me! Well, maybe I can start to make up for lost time....

Lilah Jayne Miner
October 4, 2010
9:06 PM Eastern Time