On Radio 4 today, they were talking about the editing process for John Fowles’ journals [you know, the guy who wrote The French Lieutenant’s Woman], and I found myself thinking “I’ve never managed to maintain a diary for more than a couple of days”. Which is an odd thing to say, when this blog has been existing since Oct 3rd 2004. But blogging ain’t the same. I’m writing for immediate consumption. Often, consumption by random googling strangers [Hiya, y’all!]. As such, this is a pretty impersonal space, even though I know that, with a bit of fairy dust [i.e. chatty, entertaining prose-style], some soul-baring could help attract traffic.
It’s an odd medium, really. Media coverage tends to concentrate on ways in which blogging competes with the traditional media – political opinion pieces, movie reviews and so on. That seems like a transitional phase, to me. The current bloggers’ term of ‘MSM’ (i.e. Main Stream Media) is equally a result of the newness of the situation – in a few years, a lot of bloggers will be mainstream and it will just be treated like another medium.
But blogging is just a medium, like TV or newspapers or books. What will be interesting is people finding new, different markets for words that would never be viable under the old model.