My issues with blogging have always been the audience. I am always surprised that some random user would read my personal blog or even leave a snarky comment when I write something meaningful about my life. To further complicate the matter, people who I would expect to respond in some way never do, and others leave joke comments about some minor aspect of the post, never discussing the content on the whole. It leaves me disappointed with the idea of communicating through the internet.

Mia often points out that since its a blog, people tend to not take it seriously, or don't want to respond since they may have nothing to say that would add to the conversation.

And yet I persist as a blogger, both on LJ and now on Vox as well. I am handling my Vox as a more annonymous-reader-friendly blog with no real relevant details about my life, while I will continue to write more personal entries on a blog where I am directly connected to my friends. If nothing else, at least it keeps people updated with the details of my life.

Still ... its such a useful tool, and obviously some of us take it seriously. Maybe we should all be working on communicating a little better?

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Indeed.

I think there's a degree to which you have to accept that if you post it, it's public. You can lock posts to restrict them to friends, and in that forum I think we should feel like we can open up a little more. My intention is to just mark the more personal posts as "friends and family" only. That way I can write for either the more open audience and leave it open, or the community and leave it closed, but use the same tool (Vox) to do both.

Also, you're a bit of an extreme in this regard in that you take things very personally as a part of your personality. Other people are better at letting trolls roll of their backs, but that's a discussion for four years ago, and you know that's not you. You're always going to take it personally.

Anything that has a comment form could invite spam. With things like Vox's Neighborhood or LJ's friends, where if you lock a post you can control who reads it (neglecting other people reading things on your friends' computers or whatever), there's a better expectation. I don't think it's great that the world doesn't let us just post our feelings without people being trolls, but locking a post is a simple enough precaution.

Discussion online is also just tricky to handle. Say you spend a moderate amount of time writing a post about how you're feeling about things in general, or some issue, and what you said is important to you and reflects your feelings properly. Well, maybe I'm reading this at work. Maybe I'm not in a very serious mood when I read it. It's possible I'll come back later when I've thought about it, but I might not. Online forums of communication are different than if you're sitting down with someone having a serious conversation, where you can read their context clues and can be sure they're listening and care about what you're saying. The online version would be like if you started to have that same, deep conversation but walked up to me in line at the grocery store or whatever. I'm not saying I don't care about what you might have to say, but that I think is why people don't often comment on stuff that others might very much want comments on.

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My intial blogging experience was somewhat naive, and my understanding of the Internets was not as it is today. Then it was shocking to see how awful trolls are, people being mean for the sake of being mean. It was absolutely unfathomable to me to think that someone would simply surf the internet and make awful comments on people's personal blogs just because they could. It is roughly akin to going into a neighborhood where all the doors are left unlocked at night and going into people's homes while they sleep. Yes, I acknowledge that that kind of thing does exist in real life, but this was my first interaction with it in digital form. It can be jarring.

Now I am fully accepting of the fact that trolls exist, and it has been a hard lesson. I honestly don't understand why people aren't more bothered by the simple fact that trolls exist, until I remember that I tend towards naivette and thinking that people are generally good. I get burned by this a lot.

Obviously I am a fool for taking those sorts of things personally. I can't help who I am though.

In terms of locking posts, that simply doesn't work when people like Fagan or Adam, who steadfastly refuse to join LJ, continue to read my blog for updates on my life and those of their other friends. I could certainly accept a policy of "well, they need to get on board!" but I'd much rather deal with the occasional troll and leave things open to the public than block them out. Plus, Ben Domenech!

As for people not responding, I think your point is valid, as are a million others. I am not making a case for people not having a good reason not to respond in a specific moment. I think the rhetoric of the internet creates a sense of "need to respond and disagree somehow to show that I, too, have a valid opinion," which often annoys me about forums. But in this case, I wasn't saying "people have no good reason not to respond." Rather, I was saying "people should consider taking these things more seriously and work on using this as a form for discussion." I completely agree with your assessment as to why people might not respond at a given time (the supermarket analogy fits perfectly) but more to the point was a comment on people making more of an effort, not asking why they don't.

Its roughly the equivalent to saying "we should hang out with those friends more often" or "I should start excercising more." Sure, there are a lot of reasons that play into why I don't do those things, but I am noting that really I should. Hopefully the next step is to actually do something about it.

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After TypePad had been out for like a year, Mena made a post saying that they were suprised at the number of "private" pages people made and used. TypePad has a checkbox where you can choose to make your page public, or private so that it doesn't show up in search engines, or private with a password. 25% of all the weblogs people made were private in one for or another. They found that 1/4 people wanted to share their ideas with a smaller group of people than the general public. TypePad has easily a million blogs. That's a lot of people who want to write but don't want the general public reading. (Not that any of this is in contention with what you wrote.)

As for Adam and Fagan, /shrug
This is where I'd argue that there's a trade-off, and you would argue that such trade-offs shouldn't be necessary. I'd say, if you want to write in public, you have to deal with maybe getting trolls. If you don't want that, then lock things and just make Adam and Fagan click four times to set up their free accounts.

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I'm not sure exactly when it happened, but at some point, and as best I can tell for no specific reason, I just started having more and more trouble posting meaningful things about my life, or really much at all. Some of it is a laziness that I've noticed seeping into a lot of aspects of my life, where I just often don't do things that I enjoy if they take just a little effort. I find myself spending my free time watching TV and sitting in front of a computer just surfing the same websites hoping they've updated or something rather than playing video games or blogging or any number of other things I'd probably enjoy more, and get more out of.
On the other hand I have recently felt like I've been a bit more able to get myself moving and doing stuff, and I've actually gotten some stuff planted in my garden (as well as almost finishing re-bricking the rest of the perimiter of the patch), and hopefully will have some more planted soon, as well as getting a few other things like that done around the house, so maybe things are turning around.
In fact I think I might just take this an turn it into an entry now!

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I post less in LJ than I once did primarily for two reasons: I don't have a boring office job, and I have access to IM clients now.

When I was working at DOJ, I spent most of my time bored with almost no work to do, looking to communicate with friends. At the time, I think most of us had similar jobs, but since then many people have moved up in the hierarchy and now can't spare the time for hilarious photoshopping, chain commenting, etc.. And since I can now throw thoughts out to people via googletalk or AIM, something prohibited to me at DOJ, I have fewer things that I need to throw up to LJ for discussion.

Looking at Vox, I don't feel there is much there to compel me to use it. LJ is simple and sorta clunky, but that's no hindrance to my usage of it. It's actually ideal in that it has an established friend-group, which is the only reason I ever write on LJ: to share something with a wide group of friends. Having to leap over to a new system and construct a new friend-group is work I just don't see the need for, myself. It's why I'm not active on myspace and wasn't active on friendster. I'm not a photo guy, if I find a funny video I don't feel a need to embed it and I don't typically want to write creatively in a blog setting. I'm sure other people do want all that, and so can see how appealing Vox is, with the integration and the easy of use. I'm not arguing against it, but it doesn't look like it fits my needs. It looks sorta like the HDDVD of blogging at the moment.

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You're right. LJ is very much like the entrenched technology that's good enough to do the job and everyone's already using. Vox is better in (most) every way, but if LJ's working, why bother? I have little arguement to counter that. Vox would suffice as a complete replacement to LJ, if everyone moved over, and it'd probably do more, but if LJ's doing what it needs to do, that's all there is.

One thing also that I've perceived about LJ is that it's become enough of a casual affair that people don't like to write more creative or serious things on it. If I were a musician, and had a song I wanted to sing, I'd book a gig or sit at the corner and play it before I'd just get out my guitar at your BBQ. LJ is like that. I have things I want to write that don't seem appropriate in this forum. On a TypePad or Wordpress or Blogger or Movable Type blog they might be a little bit too out there, which is where I think another service would fit in, as sort of an addition or a complement, maybe a replacement.

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