Why Blog?

At this point in the life of the Internet, everyone has a blog of some sort. Frankly I’m not sure why, the vast majority of people are just not that interesting.
Sometimes I blog just to get a monkey off my back; ideas or feelings that crash about in my head and need to be released before they damage something up there. Sometimes I blog to let people really know what is going on with me. I enjoy being a private person and I am not about to have the self-importance to think that my problems (if I do indeed have any) are unique.
But I’ve recently had the desire to be known by others. Call it a degree of loneliness or just the reluctant realization that I might actually need other people. My primary interest in keeping a blog is simply to write. I want to become better at it and the best way to do so is to practice it. That and also reading blogs of others that can actually write. Wil Wheaton has very much been my inspiration in this way. He writes very personally about common things and stories of his past quite well. And although I disagree with his politics and quite frankly my eyes glaze over when he writes about poker; he has had two books published to date, which seems a decent indicator of success. I admire him very much in his way of peeling away the distance between writer and reader and making it all very personal.
This is not my diary; nor is it a confessional but if being either of those I somehow manage to put more pixels on screen, then it has served its purpose.