Blogging - It Isn't Just For Politics

Knoxville News Sentinel writer and blogger Michael Silence has a print piece on local blogging in the paper today. (Registration Required)

While he mentions a couple of new local initiatives aimed at providing free access to create new blogs, he features a number of subjects that East Tennesseans are blogging about. Senate races, traffic roundabouts, red-light cameras, sales tax, guns, etc.

While those are all well and good subjects and things I feel it's important to keep up with, it gives me the impression that politics and other civic-related subjects are the main thrust of what blogging is about, and blogs that focus on someone's personal lives and experiences are of lesser importance. That really the only legitimate blogs are those that focus outward on society, while the ones that tend toward typing about their daily lives, jobs, kids, etc are the "fringe" sites. The second tier. The junior varsity.

I don't think this should be a correct assumption, for the majority of the sites I visit and enjoy talk mainly about their own personal experiences with the world around them. Becky is discussing the difficulties of her impending move from Hawaii to Seattle. Will discusses living and working with people of different faith. Danielle talks about the culture shock of moving to Australia. Logtar discusses being a Columbian native in the US. Tommy views life from about 2 or 3 degrees off plumb. Interstellar Lass is training for a marathon. Philip is a youth minister and sings in a Christian heavy metal band. Doug and Cathy are a husband-and-wife blogging team raising an Asperger's Syndrome teen, and April is working her way out of a bad neighborhood in San Antonio. Sheila is a fount of wisdom relating her story of living as an actress in New York. Zoot just a new baby. James Lileks talks about his little girl. And Michael is, well, Big Orange all the way.

I guess I'd like to see those of us who don't feel the need to tackle all the Issues of the Day, and prefer to focus on the things that make us what we are: relationships, jobs, church, family, dreams, hobbies... by opening up their lives and giving us a glimpse into their success and failures, we learn more about ourselves than we can ever learn by analyzing Senate Races and income tax reform. I just don't want to be seen as the second-class citizens of the blogosphere.


UPDATE: Thank you, Michael Silence. Maybe second-class citizens is too harsh. I do feel that the litmus test for blogging legitimacy is weighed too heavily toward politics, but hopefully that will eventually balance out.