BBBbbbllllloooog!

There comes a point for many bloggers when the burden to blog 'bout blogging itself bares the benefit of a few moments of the blogger's busy babble. Blogging is a relatively new phenomenon and since blogging is self reflective by its very nature, it makes sense that you often see blogging about the phenomenon itself. Blogs can be many things. There are opinion,blogs where people find a forum for their incessant takes on this or that, because their friends/family/co-workers just don't seem to care as much as the illusion of an audience (or in many cases an actual audience that you never knew existed) that blogging provides. Then there are blogs about all sorts of interests: cooking, hiking, reading, you name it there is a blog for it. Then there are the random observation blogs, much like this one, that seem to collect the detritus of one's web-surfing, external observations, and internal dialogues. This blog probably falls into that category, although I certainly could write about many other aspects of my life but have chosen for mine and everyone else's sake to limit it to the general theme of life in law school. (disclaimer: I am sure there are many other different types of blogs, but I am not going to get into that here)

Beside blogs, there are a whole series of "social network" sites out there such as MySpace and Facebook, which incorporate some of the elements of blogging (usually a personal blog is one part of these sights) along with friends comments, and are a host to a plethora of profile-type information (favorite foods/classes/movies/etc). These sites are especially popular with teenagers and law students, both of which seem to have plenty of time to gossip with their friends, post videos, and take personality quizzes to post to your site. There has been plenty of hype about Myspace lately and again, I do not really wish to get into a discussion of such activities but to say my dabbling with that world left me frightened--either because it disturbed my deep Luddite longings or because I saw the vast potential for "time-sucking" (if that word hasn't been coined yet, I want credit).

For me, I am happy with this blog. Since I am in law school and my time is limited, I think I will keep my focus on this particular vehicle for maintaining my presence on the web. I realize it doesn't have the same social networking capabilities, and comments are left anonymously and not with nifty pictures of my friends, but be it selfishness or just taste, I like this medium. I really never even thought people would read this blog, but as I began to take a greater interest in the quality of my posts, I began to want people to also read them. I have told more people in the last months and I am even thinking of e-mailing all the people in my adress book with a link just in case they want to keep up on these observations. I guess our personality in cyberspace does take on some of the characteristics of who we are in real life. I have a tendency to be, well, slow to let other's in on what is going in on my life (so I hear from my parents) and it has taken more than six months to really think, hey, maybe I should share this little piece of internal dialogue. We'll see.

As far as this blog goes, it has never really been one thing. There was that phase where I was very structured, posting weekly with specific themes for specific sections and as of late my posts have been more ad hoc. I guess I haven't figured out what I like best: maybe a combination of both, but I am sure this will not be the end of the evolution, and the whole point of this was to chronical the first year of law school. You might ask, what does blogging have to do with that? Well, for one, the legal profession, consisting mostly of reading and writing, is full of blogs, blogging, and bloggers, and two, anyone who has been in a law school lately will notice that everyone is on the computer and that a huge percentage of social interaction and connection takes place through IM, blogging, profiles, social networks, e-mail, etc. You can't fight the flood, but you can choose the boat you want to float in.