Blogs.

These "weblogs" have been getting pretty popular within the year(s), and frankly, I approve. I think it's putting Internet space to some good use, by letting everybody contribute, create and share. I'm no judge on the quality of a "blog", but through observation I've deduced that at least most blogs are created for one, or more, of the following purposes:

• A journal/diary-esque recounting of the author's day, complete with their bias and feelings on different subjects important to them, like their love life, current drama, and online surveys and memes of no real consequence, along with their current mood and music.
  
• An outlet for an author's artwork, creative writing, novels, poetry, fanfiction, etc.
  
• A political forum and/or soap box platform, where the author gives his views on current "hot" topics in politics and world news.
  

These blog "types" range in quality and can be very diverse in nature. You could find interesting political blogs, such as Crooks and Liars, which is a hella liberal blog site that uses video clips and diagnostics and stuff. Then sort of crappy ones, presenting only one view and full of shameless self-promotion (Michael, I'm looking right at you). There's also neat novels in blog-form, like this one, and even this one. I think that is an awesome way to write a book if you do not have any publishing resources and want people to read it (by linking them). This may be my favorite type of blog so far. The type of blog most people know though, are the typically angst-ridden personal websites popular among teens and pre-teens across the country, so people can read exactly how they're feeling and hopefully in some way feel sorry for them and give them the meager attention they crave...though this does not always happen though.

This later type of blog are mostly used through websites such as Livejournal.com, Myspace.com, Xanga.com and The Open Diary. There're a bunch more, but I definitely don't feel like linking to all of them.

I'm not going to lie. I own a blog. You're reading it, yeah, yeah, I know. But in the past, I kept a couple of blogs of ... "ill repute."

As far as type goes, they fit the first category. They were all very lame. I say "all" because I switched sites a lot, alternating between different journals with different changes in my life. I am now, hopefully with a cathartic effect, cataloging all my past blogs (in chronological order):

Free Open Diary

T'was my first blogging experience. My sophomore year in high school. It was a lame and sad time of my life. I created it because my girlfriend at the time had one, the reason need not go further than that. Thank God Almighty, that due to not writing in it after a couple or so months, it was deleted and expired, and no one may ever read it's contents (I wrote poetry. Enough said).

Blurty #1

I wasn't quite so much an emo-nerd-loser-boy in this one, but I was still very angsty. My writing had only improved incrementally, and I still posted song lyrics. I made a few stabs at writing fictional material, but they went unnoticed. It was basically my rants and raves about the horrid days of highschool. Highschool was not cool. I look back for nostalgic laughs and chuckles, but I don't recommend it to anyone.

Blurty #2

A short-lived side project based on the fact I attempted to fast myself from sleep for a couple of days. The attempt failed, but I did not tell my friends about this new blog on the side of my main Blurty account. It taught me the value of writing for myself, and only myself with no audience, which ironically is the reason people wrote in "journals" or "diaries" back in the days of old anyways. Fancy that.

LiveJournal #1

I switched from the simple, young, naive Blurty to the wide, wicked and lame world of Loserjournal, because all of my friends did. It was also prompted by a crush on a cute girl that I ended up being magnificent friends with, but I don't blame her for the addiction that followed. I posted a lot, primarily about the transition from my senior year in high school to the first semester of my freshmen year in college. My writing style began changing, because I had a surge of reading and writing in that time of my life. You can actually read along and mark the entries I've made where I start becoming a new and different person than I was in high school. Quite interesting stuff...if you were to ever do a documentary on me. I don't think you should do that though. That would kind of creep me out.

Blogger #1

I decided it'd be a fun idea to try out Blogger. I had found it accidentally over the Internet, searching for other blogging sites. So I started the "Autotravisography" trying to tell my life story from start to finish, like a memoir in the making, or just an autobiography. Anyways, I never really got into it and eventually deleted it.

Livejournal #2

After breaking up with my girlfriend in the dusk of my first semester at college, I decided I wanted a new livejournal aimed more towards my friends at USM. I also didn't want my ex reading about all the details of my life. She found it anyways, but whatever. New developments: I started to use pictures much more, and I started using it as a bulletin board for events I was attending or putting on, such as concerts or parties taking place in my dorm room. I had a fun time with it, it became less emotional and angsty and more casual and fun. It's really still in existence for my own petty amusement. Or maybe I just can't let go...

Blogger #2

After witnessing the amazing success of my roommate Jake's blog, I decided to give it another try. I tried it based on the "writing for myself" principle, mainly due to the fact I knew very few people would read it. And very few people did, and I sort of felt like a jerkwad copycat so I made it more fitting to it's subtitle "A Wasteland of Thought" and started dumping all my writing projects, finished or not, into it. Then stopped doing that too.

Blogger #3

That's right, I just linked you to the site you're already on. How fuckin' cool is that. This is the Travipedia, which is along the same line as my first Blogger venture. I have all these stories I tell all the god damned time and I will forget I told you them and start telling them again to be met by "Dude...I've heard this story eight times," but then someone there would be like "Well, I haven't heard how Travis totalled his Stepdad's truck. Or how he lost his virginity. Or how he accidentally ate laundry detergent." So I started this site, to archive them all and maybe see if my ridiculous life is humorous enough to garner some Internet attention.

I mean, I've already left my digital footprint on the Information Superhighway enough with all the previous "blogs," why not take another stab at my 15 minutes of Web Fame...which I guess is more like 15 seconds with the highspeed nature of our youth these days.

That was fun. I hope nobody actually reads those though. Embarassment to perhaps it's highest degree.

Whatever...I'm over it.