YESTERDAY WAS OTBKB’S OFFICIAL ANNIVERSARY AND OTBKB FORGOT. DUH. Here’s a piece from two year’s ago.

There’s something  about a blog that makes a person want, no, need, no, desperately need, some sort of response. It’s a big shout into the universe for attention. A yearning yelp into an echoey tunnel as in: Hello, is anyone there? Does anyone want to play? Is anybody listening? Hello? Hello? Hellooooooooooooooo?

Pathetic, eh?   

Actually
it’s a little embarrassing. And yet, why write a blog unless someone is
going to read it? Isn’t that the whole point of the exercise. And it’s
not just Smartmom out there blogging — though her blog is, by all
reports, wildly original and fun. There are tens of thousands of blogs
at Blogspot alone. Haven’t you ever wondered what that small button on
the masthead that says "next blog" means? Try it someday and you’ll
see. There’s a whole world of blogs out there, people from all over the
world desperate to
communicate.(Smartmom
has read blogs from Adelaide, Australia; Florence, Italy; Stutgart,
Germany; Singapore, Thailand, Lebanon, even New Jersey.)

Kind
of gets you thinking, doesn’t it? Is all this blogging a cry for help
or the proverbial note in the bottle thrown out to the proverbial sea?

Yes,
indeed. Blogging has has become one gigundo phenomenon. And Blogspot is
probably just one of hundreds of blog-generating sites for those desperate
to be heard. In a sense, Blogspot is a global village for the
graphomaniacs of the world. Marshall McCluhan could never have imagined
such a thing. And he thought television was going to be the big global
municipality.

Fact is, there are millions of blogs out
there worldwide. Imagine: a small virtual universe of people striving
for connection.

Now that’s really profound, isn’t it? It’s
friggin existential. Contemplating it now, Smartmom feels like a tiny,
tiny speck in the blog universe. So very small and insignificant. Very,
very teeny tiny.

So the question arises: Is anyone reading
these blogs? Smartmom thinks the answer is a resounding "yes." While there are clearly hundreds of thousands (alright, millions) of
people with the voracious need to tell-all about the minutae of their
daily lives, there are also hundreds of thousands who are hopelessly
voyeuristic, dying to read the dirty and the well-pressed laundry of
others. Hey, you just know it’s true. Smartmom and the bloggers of the
world are banking on it. Btw, is there any money in blogging? Answer:
Nope.

Which isn’t to say that there isn’t a value to writing a
blog that no-one reads. Surely blogging, like writing in a journal, has
many purposes. For one thing, it a great way to get in touch with your
inner Erma Bombeck, your inner Sylvia Plath, and your inner Maureen
Dowd. All at once. Really, truly, it is immeasurably pleasurable to
write just to write.

But there are limits.

Writing for
writing sake is something that writer’s do. But come on, isn’t writing
all about communication? And communication requires a recipient…

Does the word interactivity mean
anything to you? Hence, the "comment" link on the bottom of each and
every one of Smartmom’s posts.

Maybe the real reason Smartmom
created this blog is because she leads the lonely life of a freelance
writer—alone day in and day out in her basement lair. Her officemate,
Real Fruit Jelly, isn’t around much anymore. Smartmom and Real Fruit
Jelly, like many good friends and office mates, used to spend an awful
lot of time analyzing their lives. That’s what they love to do. And it
was like free therapy around here.

Now, Smartmom’s only
companion is a rather spiffy laptop computer. In a sense, she’s had to
create an imaginary friend who will listen to her.

Hello? Is anybody there? Is anybody really listening? Helloooooooooooooooooooooooo…

–originally posted October 2004