All About Blogging on MySpace
There are many MySpace features that offer users of the website opportunities to put their whole life on their profile. Pictures, videos, voice recordings, all of it can be uploaded and linked directly onto your website. For those of you that find that words say more than pictures, the blogging feature of the website is perhaps one of the most expressive ones. Some people leave their blogging space completely empty whereas other members write a new blog just about every day. Blogs range from simple rants to existential philosophy on life; it’s the place on one’s profile where the brain shines right through. If what a person is thinking about is best expressed in writing, the blog is the best way to gain insight into what a particular MySpace member is thinking.
Blogs can be written at any time and uploaded onto your profile space. There are also a few tell-tale questions/categories to be filled in about the mood that one is in while writing the blog and the category of the blog’s topic. While these are handy features when it comes to finding a blog of a person you don’t know that’s on a certain topic that you’d like to know more about, a lot of users leave these categorical questions blank. A lot of blogs simply can’t be classified, or they fall into multiple categories, and putting them in more than one category is not one of the many options of MySpace profiles.
Once a blog is written, and in the font and color that you find appropriate, the blog entry is posted and becomes a part of your online blogging journal that can be accessed through your profile page. Once posted, the blog can be read online by your friends (or visitors-be careful) and, in true MySpace style, comments can be posted about the blog or about the person, or anything at all that the commenter chooses to comment on. In addition, one has the opportunity to give kudos, meaning ‘is this a great blog or what?!’. The writer of the blog can then comment on the comments and other readers can comment on the blog itself or any of the comments made on it. It is possible to subscribe to the blogs of your best friends or simply to the blogs of people that you think write well or who have interesting stories to tell. Once you are subscribed, you will receive a notification each time that user posts a blog so that you know to go read it and post comments on it. In addition, the writer of the blog can see how many times their blogs have been read (although they can’t see by whom) in order to get an idea of their readership.
Some MySpace users find this feature too invasive because, depending on what you write, people are really getting inside your thoughts. Other MySpace users adore the blogging feature precisely for this reason. While photographers tend to upload picture after picture and bands tend to upload their recordings to their profile to get better exposure, writers and philosophers tend to write many blog entries, claiming that it’s what’s being thought that’s most important in life. It’s for this kind of depth of communication on a philosophical level that they came to MySpace in the first place. Blogging on MySpace is the equivalent of writing a diary that the whole world can pop open and not only read, but comment on. Of course, not all blogs are philosophical, in fact there are more simple blogs than transcendental ones, but nonetheless, this feature remains one of the English major’s and the Philosophy major’s favorite MySpace features.
