During the class on blogs, somebody asked what the attraction is, and someone else replied that he liked to write to get things off his chest. But that led to the very reasonable response, "Why would you want to do that in public?" At the time, nobody came up with a decent answer to that, but I've been thinking about it since, and wondering, why? What is it about blogging that's so attractive to so many people?

Now that I’ve had time to think about it, I’ve realised that it was that exact question that led me to starting my first blog. It was back in the early days of blogs, and I read an article somewhere about this interesting new phenomenon on the internet, where people were posting their private thoughts in online diaries that anyone could read. A search led me to a blog site, where I discovered that one side of the fascination of blogs was the sheer voyeurism of reading the private thoughts of strangers, but I still didn't really get why someone would want to write one. So in the spirit of enquiry, I decided to start writing one myself.

I remember the idea of total anonymity was really interesting to me at the time, and I made a conscious decision at the beginning to reveal as little about myself as possible, and find out just how private it was possible to remain, while at the same time writing honestly about your life. I made that explicit in my first blog entry:

I suppose at this point I'm supposed to introduce myself, but I don't think I want to - I'd prefer to let you figure it out all by yourselves. I'm sure I'll let plenty of details slip as I go along. Anyway, if I tell you everything up front, what's going to make you want to keep reading - my life isn't that exciting! If you really can't cope without knowing all about who, what, where, and why I am, then you have my permission to use your imagination (just as long as you imagine me to be a nice person!).

Two days later, when I got my first comment, I discovered one of the biggest attractions of blogging - the sense of community. Suddenly my blog wasn't just being sent out into the ether - it had real live people reading it (although it's obvious from the above extract that I had a sense of writing for an audience from the start). And as I began to read the blogs of my commenters, and comment on them myself, my blog was no longer a monologue to strangers, but part of an ongoing conversation with friends.

And ironically, I think that in the end became its downfall for me - the anonymity that had first interested me in the idea of blogging seemed wrong as part of that conversation, yet I felt I couldn't drop that anonymity, because my blog was still public, and I'd written too many of the sorts of things you can only say in private (like comments about the people I worked with). I suppose I could have made my blog private, but by doing that you're excluding casual reader who drops in to glance at your blog - the very way I met my online friends in the first place. After about a year my blog entries began to drop off, as I found the struggle for anonymity more and more difficult, and by the end of the second year I'd completely lost interest - entries were coming months apart and becoming increasingly cryptic, and in the end I gave up completely. I’d discovered that the two main things that attracted me to blogging, anonymity and community, aren't entirely compatible.

This course has allowed me to look back on my blogging experience in a whole new light. If a blog is a narrative, then of course it needs someone to read it. It needs an audience. And learning that has made me acknowledge the other big appeal of blogging – knowing that someone’s out there reading what you’re writing. Whether a blogger is seeking a circle of friends to share his life with, someone to agree with her rants, or even just someone to shock, blogging needs (and assumes) an audience.