On Web Journaling

Notes to self (on journaling): Picked up Brian Eno's A Year: With Swollen Appendices last night again. Though I was enjoying it immensely, I had quit reading it around the last time I posted about it. Good stuff. Got me inspired to try and write more thoughtful things here in Evhead, be less conscious of my audience (to a certain extent), do more notes-to-self-type posts, and try to avoid trivialities (unless they're fun trivialities). Also got me thinking about keeping a journal/diary (the book, if you're not familiar, is Eno's diary for a year) and publishing it on the web. Or not. One thought: whether or not you can publish something has a lot to do with time. If you write about events as they're happening, people involved in the events might read it, and you could influence the events in ways you might not want to. For a lot of things, however, once the event is in the past, it's not a problem to reveal your thoughts about it. Most memoirs, in fact, wouldn't reveal the stuff they do if they were published in real time. So what if you wrote an online journal but published it on a lag? Say, six months or a year later. You could write with abandonment and then approve whether or not the posts went out every day and veto them. It'd make you really conscious of what's happening in your life as time passed and possible patterns you may not be aware of. Plus, it'd be fascinating to read someone's less-censored journal on a daily basis. Then again, if it wasn't real-time, maybe the appeal of having it on the web and daily would be lost.