EDIT: To read the post above, please request for password, as the post may be sensitive to certain people. All requests from regular commenters will be accepted. The rest will be based on my discretion. Sorry for the inconvenience.

I was reading Mr. Javo’s post on why blogs have taken over the internet, and it suddenly provoked many questions… Why is it that I blog? How did I start blogging? Why am I still blogging?

Come to think of it, I started blogging in 1999 with the advent of blogger.com. I joined primarily out of peer pressure. Everyone who owned a domain at that time started this new thing called blogging. I was never comfortable about publishing my life to the public. And I thought…who could possibly care about the adventures of some 13 year old living in Asia. But I gave in. And I have to admit… I really didn’t like it.

Yet, as much as I didn’t like it, I continued to blog, domain after domain, year after year. Then came Mezza-9.net. The blog was mainly an excuse to learn how to design layouts - to design at the caliber of the best cream of blogger-designers of that day. All my posts were about updates I have made. Nothing from my life was ever revealed. I received insane amount of comments - close to 100 comments per post. I received fan mail. Had insane amounts of visitors. And I was the 6th most important Ivy in the world according to Google and the #1 on Yahoo, beating out the band Operation Ivy and even Ivy League. But I wasn’t happy. What started as a road to be a good designer, ended up as a slave to more comments, more fanmail, more everything to please my visitors - at the expense of myself.

So I reluctantly closed Mezza-9.net. And blogged in low-profile until Nanyate.Com.

Even now, I still don’t fully understand why I blog. And much like Mezza-9.Net, I put my entire soul into Nanyate?!. I spend so much time thinking about what to write so that my entries are entertaining enough for you. I spend almost an hour on longer posts sweeping for errors, so that it will be easily understood by most of you.

Then I would smile when I see my subscriber count hit 50, and frown - even if its for a micro-second - when plummets to 30. I would smile when people leave me comments. Not for the number of comments but for the quality of comments. I would get so happy to see that people actually read my entries and notice the insignificant details I add on. Each and every comment means a lot to me, and as such I try to answer to most of them. Some of these great comments even set the precedence for future entries - Melle’s question about me leaving Canada for good and Soyuzno’s request for my Korean kimchee pork recipe. (Both that I will answer next month, btw.)

Not to mention, I would get especially happy when I see my visitors visit each others’ sites and leave comments on each others’ sites. I feel like I’m part of a circle of people.

Maybe that’s precisely why I blog - to be part of a circle of people; people who want to be heard, people who dare to be heard. But most of all - people who yearn to be recognized from the faceless crowd we call society. Because I too want to be heard.

So, why do you blog? How did you start blogging?

Sudden Hiatus until April 10

As much as I love blogging, I have to go to another hiatus. My Chinese professor just told us that the final ‘test’ will include material from all 20 chapters of the textbook, instead the 8 he promised a couple months ago. I can’t believe he changed the exam two weeks before the final exam. So now all my free time is going to be devoted to that stupid exam, as well as a research paper I have due on the same day.

I know I shouldn’t complain, because I will be done with my undergraduate degree in two weeks. But I just can’t wait to see the real world.

Edited: Updated to Wordpress 2.5

I found no errors when I updated my new blog at LanguageDiary.Com (surprise! I released the URL, though there’s nothing there just a placeholding theme), so I updated Nanyate.com. Please let me know if there are any errors as Nanyate uses a lot more plugins. Thanks!