Are blogs a means of self-expression or the final commodification of private experience? I go both ways on this one. Writing demands an audience, even if it is an imagined one. People with literary aspirations always have an image of their reader (however idealized) in mind as they write. Blogs, of course, are a much less formal mode of writing. Perhaps they rely on our voyeuristic impulses, like a diary found in an attic would. Maybe they’re just an expression of collecitve egoism. I use my own mostly for my own benefit–so I can look back and see what I was working on and find traces of what I was thinking at some point in the recent past. I used to do the same thing with a private journal that started in a composition book before migrating to a hard drive. I suppose it’s only natural that it has now migrated to a database on a network. But if accessability were the only concern, I could require authentication to view the page. It’s the desire for connections the fuels it. We like to read another’s words and say “I know what this person is talking about. I’ve thought this before. I’d do the same thing.”