One of my favourite bloggers Orac has a post asking “Who Are Your Blogparents?”; in other words, who or what started you blogging?
I can’t really point to any one person or blog that started me off. My first blogging experience was with the Open Diary, a sort of forerunner to LiveJournal. I joined in August 2000, shortly after I got online, and cannot now remember how I heard of it. I kept a Diary on there for over a year; at first, it was completely free. I posted several times a week and, finding myself in a whole cyber-community, developed lots of new friends. (Like for instance Dustbinman, a self-described “meeja whore” who worked for the BBC; his tales about work, the Beeb and his, shall we say, interesting social life made for great reading. He still blogs, on his own site, but very infrequently and nowhere near as entertainingly)
Then, they introduced subscription Diaries, with lots of extras for the paying customers. One of the extras was the ability to lock your Diary at various levels (previously every Diary had been completely public); you could just lock it from anyone who wasn’t on OD, or you could exclude everyone who didn’t have an OD subscription, or everyone who wasn’t on your ‘Friends List’. Practically every Open Diarist I was familiar with migrated to the subscrioption service, I couldn’t afford to. I was able to still read some of their Diaries, but suddenly I was left with a vast swill of semi-literate, mostly teen, mostly American Diarists that I couldn’t get on with at all.
So I took off my Diary, archiving it on my hard drive, and forgot about keeping a public diary of any sort. Eventually, after a couple of years of reading blogs, I decided that the time was right for getting a proper blog – I already had the Oakleaf Circle site up, so I could run it on there. WordPress was recommended as the easiest blogging software going – and free. So that’s how I ended up with this.