Blogs are my friends.

You know what's weird. Blogs today.

This entry is going to become a little bit of a "whoa-but-look-at-what-you-are-doing-yourself" entry. But, oh well.

Blogging has becomes pretty much the only way I read about things. It's weird just how the pieces fell into place. The browser I use (Flock) makes blogging so easy--both the writing and the reading (Flock's RSS viewing is the best I have ever used, even better than the previous stalwart, Safari, and slicker than IE7's). My little browser toolbar even has a little icon that becomes orange when a new entry has been inputted by any of the oh-so-many blogs I read.

Then my email client (Outlook 2007 Beta) supports these RSS feeds that blogs can output. I have gone from several hours reading about news to simply minutes just skimming past non-interesting articles. Plus, RSS seems to strip away all the advertisements.

But what's weird is how I communicate with my friends now. Before, I used to see them--walking to class, sitting next to them, eating food with them. Then I graduated. We all got jobs and did our own thing. It shifted into the phone calls with the occasional party. Then to emails that got answered every now and then, based usually on how bored we were at work. Then one day, I discovered personal blogging.

It's always been around. I've known about it when reading about up and coming gadgets. I have seen it integrated into a few bands webpages. But I never thought I would have one of my own.

Now, it seems that when I want to find out how a friend is doing, I simply visit his blog. Now, I am not talking about the ever-so-popular MySpace crap, which I have easily resisited and will continue doing so, as that is a horrible concept (let's have thousands of friends, blah blah blah, none of which I know who exactly they are). For instance, I have a good friend, Billy, who is about the hardest man to hang out with--he's always doing something. So I read his blog at my convenience.

Another weird aspect is how we have been replaced by our own digital presence. Much like the CDs I own are now replaced by it's MP3/AAC version on my iPod while the originals sit collecting dust in a dark corner of my closet--while its compressed digital ones-and-zero copy get played hundreds of times (no one email me about how the original CD is a set of digital ones-and-zeros--it's different). Take, for instance, my friend Alfred. He has recently become known to me as the guy with the cool wedding website. I know he's more than that, but as of now, his site has become his presence. Another example is this person I see every now and then at work. He's not the kindest person, but now when I see him, I chuckle inside remember that he likes the Gilmore Girls (says his MySpace profile). I see that people actually answer the blog comments more than they do their own voicemails.

This change in communications has come quickly, yet transparently to this overweight techie writing this blog right now. If you stay on top of technology, I guess you just don't see that the "next big thing" is happening everyday, so frequently that it becomes old and not so apparent. I know blogs have been around for a long as time, but it hit me earlier today just how much it has affected my everyday.

Want to know something cool? My next phone is going to have blog capabilities built-in. I can take pictures and transmit it directly to this blog spot.

Cool, huh?

Well--till the next blog entry--see you later.

technorati tags:blogs, cell, phones, flock, rss, outlook, beta, change, friends, sony, ericsson, camera

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