I guess this is primarily a response to godwin's post on the same topic ...

I think the purpose of journaling from person to person varies. Some people like the idea to announce their lives to the world, while others do use it to vent. But I think there are a lot of people who do use journaling simply as a method of relieving stress. Of course, there come additional benefits, but I don't do journaling for those additional benefits. It's done for me. Not for you. Not for everyone else. Me. Me me me me me.

Prior to my adoption of Livejournal, Xanga, and Tabulas, I used to blog on various different sites. Most of these sites did not have a commenting feature or any type of feedback. This is really rudimentary, but it's how it used to be. People in those days really did it to relieve stress. I've been running various journals for years now (the earliest is 1998, but I can only find a 1999 cache) ... and a lot of those journals were kept private (but still available on the Internet). I even created an alter-ego for some time where I could blog "privately."

So this begs the question, if I'm ranting for myself, why don't I keep it private? For availability's sake. Private entries have a tendency to get lost. I've left my archives online so I can read them at any time. I'm sure if I made them private, I would of lost them. Would I be better off taking these offline? Probably. There's a lot of stuff on there that's really private, but I don't mind. If someone can read it and it helps THEM relieve THEIR stress and problems, then there's another reason to keep it public.

Of course, there is some comfort when you're down to know you can scream your feelings and thoughts out into the void of the Internet. It's just like screaming into your pillow - there's absolutely no reason to do it, but sometimes it feels better to just do it.

Now, this isn't to mean that everybody does this - but "hardcore" journalers understand where I'm coming from. The "hardcore" journalers are not interested so much in the community and feedback; their readership will follow them wherever they go - which is why they tend to migrate from domain to domain and service to service. This is a hard concept for a lot of people to understand (especailly newer people - "how can you just journal? don't you need feedback?"), but the longer you blog, the less important comments and feedback are. You do it just to do it. It's natural.

Now my "beef" (notice the quotation marks) with Xanga is not that it's a horrible service. I think it fills a very specific niche (that luckily I'm not trying to fill). My "beef" is that Xanga somehow makes people think they are hardcore journalers. There are a few real journalers on Xanga, one that I've been following for some time now, but as a general whole, Xanga is *not* a journaling service. It is, in essence, a glorified popularity contest. Xanga promotes features that actually push the popularity contest features over journaling features. That is my "beef" with Xanga.

I know my friends laugh at Tabulas' gay catchphrase, "Chronicle Your Life," but it really is what Tabulas was meant to be. Tabulas is meant to be your digital diary. Your digital scrapbook. A place you look back in a few years, read through your stuff, and go, "Damn, I grew up."

When I was younger, there were no services like this. You had to learn how to manage websites. You had to do all the HTML by hand. But now with my computer skills expanding, I have created these tools so you don't have to go through the learning curve that I had to go through - just to journal and keep a record of your life. It should be everyone's right to keep a log of their life.

... by using Tabulas and give me assloads of money in the process. HAR!

P.S. I love journaling cause it makes me practice my writing skills on a daily basis. I know some of my entries are grammatically shit and are incoherent, but as a whole, journaling has improved my writing skills dramatically. My roommates keep saying that i have a "voice" on my journal that's distinctly mine.

See? Good!