When I started blogging, it was so easy to find people who wrote about their lives and ideas and thoughts. They expressed themselves and found a voice in themselves. But apparently it's gotten too risky to do that, basically putting your diary online. But those blogs were also life stories people were writing. At least slices of life stories. It's telling that despite being interesting, that was too risky. But that's also why teenage girls' diaries had locks on them.

Now people just post family or trip pictures or family trip pictures and boring safe stuff to share only with close friends and family – the only people who might (barely) care about the most boring, superficial aspect of their lives.

Now the internet is full of "how to" blogs and theme blogs and the only time blogs are mentioned in media or conversation is when referring to the handful of "professional bloggers" – political commentators, mostly.

That's one reason I've kept this a heart-on-sleeve personal blog – just because everyone else has run away from doing this sort of thing. But everyone has to do their own risk assessment, and my risk is very low. Even people who've known me in the past who inadvertently find this get too freaked out to stay.

For some time now, this has been a pretty internal, navel-gazing blog. I do think that can be attributed to the loss of having a "community" of bloggers, just people doing the same thing that served as an inspiration. There's an analogy to life somewhere in here, I just know it.