The blogging effect

First of all, thanks to all those who have been commenting on my postings. Its good to be able to have a dialogue, where one's thoughts are constantly questioned. So naturally, I have feedback regarding each comment posted, but for some reason I'm doing everything else but providing it.

My blogging experience so far has been pretty much addictive! I started out thinking that I'll barely write something every now and then. What's happening is that everytime I have a thought, I want to log it down. I'm not sure if that was really my initial intention of when I started this whole thing, but the intentions are certainly evolving.

Because of me getting into weblogging, I've discovered a whole lot of other interesting blogs, which lead to others, creating one massive web of weblogs. And its really different to read a piece of news, opinion, or thought on a weblog than on a 'traditional' news site. The difference I guess is that they mostly reflect personal opinions, provide lots of freedom for everyone to voice their opinion, and to hear opinions and news those are not channeled through mainstream media. They also allow for contribution where everyone is actually contributing to the news delivery, and ofcourse a main difference is unaccountability. So alot of reasons not to take what's written on weblogs for granted, and yet they're pretty damn interesting.

Until I've become an active weblogger, I couldn't realize what was so drastically different than the familiar homepages, news and infromational sites. Just now I'm starting to figure it out, and its starting to take a toll on my 'real' life. During that last week, since I've started blogging, I've spent too much time posting blogs, reading blogs, reading and writing comments on different postings, as well as trying to improve the appearance and features of my weblog! I spent probably over 6 hours last night looking for better blog hosts than what I'm using now, fiddeling around with style sheets and templates, looking into how I can add TrackBack, categories, etc., etc. I actually found a great blog host using WordPress (which is apparently packed with features, and is Free software). So I spent some time there trying to setup a good blog page, until I read their Terms of Service which had a clause that indicated to me that they can stop hosting my blog anytime based on personal judgments of what I say in by blog. I asked them how they would interpret what is "offensive, racist, abusive, harmful, hateful", etc. (they had lots of words there), and I got no reply. I don't really want to be accountable for what I say on my blog, and I don't like that clause allowing a group of people who think different than I do to decide what is offensive in my content. Blogger/Google can certainly decide to kick me out anytime for my content too, I know. Well, its not that I'm saying anything that's of any value that could hurt someone that much, but, eh.. whatever.

I think the real reason I didn't switch to Blogsome, is I spent a very long time fiddling around with the blog template, and the thing still didn't look good. I like this template that I'm using here. I'm not a fan of the color black, but for some reason I feel that this color marks it as a real personal blog. It also lets you fade in if you stare too much and keep reading for long. Pulls you in kinda. Suits my taste for now atleast.

I still wanna dump a few more thoughts about blogging, but I'd better not be late to my friends who are waiting on me to go out. I've already missed going to the gym and jogging twice this week 'cause I'm spending too much time blogging.