Personal Blogs vs. Facebook

There is this category of blogs out there, that are not about a specific topic, that are not there to promote something, or to talk about anything in particular. I call those personal blogs. Not in the sense that they contain information that shouldn't be made public, on the contrary, but because the only cohesive factor is that the particular authors consider what they write to be important to them, and worth sharing. Those are blogs that won't be read by many people (unless the author is well known). In fact, this very blog is what I consider to be a personal blog.

Many of the people I work with and many of my friends have a personal blog. I read those blogs, and some do read mine. I think of personal blogs as competing with Facebook, and such, but with more openness, because what you post is visible not only to "your friends", but to whoever is interested in that subjects and finds it through Google or otherwise.

That openness is important to me. Yes, you can post something on Facebook for your 50 friends to see. Can you consider what you share with 50 friends to be private? I wouldn't. So you might as well share it with whoever is interested, through a public blog. There is much value in doing so for others, who can read something that would otherwise have been visible only to your "friends", locked behind the Facebook walled garden. And there is much value to you as well: more people will be able to discover and read what you wrote, and you might even get from time to time some great feedback (like in this case) from people who you completely didn't know. Go blogs!