Laurabelle's Blog

My friend Maggie has a .plan, and she writes on it a lot. Basically, if I want to stay at all in touch with what's going on in her life, I have to read her .plan, because she very rarely emails. (Part of that's due to the fact that she has very high standards for emails, so whenever she does write them, she spends hours writing just one email.) Of course, I can't really criticize her for not writing email, because I've been a bad correspondent too. I have a .plan, and I try to update enough that Maggie feels it's worth reading semi-regularly, but I update my blog much more frequently. So I've been admonishing her to read my blog, and yesterday or the day before she did, for the first time in a while.

And of course she put comments on her .plan. Thus spake Maggie:

lbm - i can't quite fathom how blog people can have so very much to say on
a regular basis. otherwise i'd join your blog ring . . . me, i like the
perpetually expanding and disappearing .plan. the thought of archiving my
thoughts is just ... augh! why bother?
(yes, i have a webpage. but the goal there is perfection, not expansion)

And when I asked (on my .plan) if I could respond on my blog, quoting her .plan, she said:

lbm - somehow, i knew you were going to say that ;-P
of course. quote away ...

I feel ever-so-slightly defensive at her saying I knew you were going to say that, but in all fairness, it was to be expected. I am rather predictable sometimes. It's just that I feel my response to her is more the sort of thing that I would put on a blog rather than a .plan, for several reasons.

First of all, there's the question of audience. Basically, only Maggie reads my .plan. Maybe other people read it occasionally, but I would be very surprised if it had an audience other than one friend. It's kind of having a public forum where I don't say anything personal in case someone reads it, but in fact I only have the one reader. It's silly, I suppose, and in fact I'm not sure why I update my .plan at all, if that's the case. Why don't I just send Maggie email? I dunno. Anyway, no matter who chooses to read my .plan, there are many people who can't. Many people I would like to make part of my audience (for example, friends and family) wouldn't have the first clue how to finger an account.

The second consideration is that a .plan is inherently transitory. Short of keeping a .plan archive (which Maggie has done briefly), once you take it off the .plan, it's gone. Maggie likes that dynamism, but it makes me paranoid that I'll miss something on her .plan if I don't read it at least every day. I prefer to keep a blog with archives, so that people can go back and read a post if they want. Just the other week Maggie herself wanted to find a post in my archives (of course that was in the old, now dead and completely lost blog, so she couldn't find it unfortunately). More importantly, it means that people don't miss out on too much if they only read my blog every couple of weeks, and stuff has scrolled off the front page.

The third and last consideration is related to the first two and is basically that I write very different things in blog and .plan. I think of them as similar but different fora. On my .plan I write little facetious notes to Maggie and whoever else might happen to read them; on my blog I tend to write longer, more involved essays about my life and thoughts. I have been partially influenced in this by Maggie's own .plan writing style, which involves sentence fragments, whimsies of capitalization and punctuation, and trains of thought which rarely run on schedule. Don't think I'm criticizing her, because it's just the way she talks in real life. It's lovely to read her voice in that way, so I write that way back to her, like a conversation. But that's not how I write in my blog. In my blog, it's more like I'm making a speech. Maybe a casual speech, but a speech nevertheless.

As for having so very much to say on a regular basis, I don't quite know how Maggie can say that with a straight face, since she often writes entire sagas on her .plan. Maybe she thinks it doesn't count if she deletes if afterward? And of course not all bloggers write regularly, not even I.

It all comes down to a matter of taste. I say blog, she says .plan; in the end all that matters is that we communicate in one way or another.