Metaphor is an old blog. If you cruise around the blogosphere you will see that not many have sites been active longer than this one. I started when blogging started; at least, when it started going mainstream. I had been trying to design a kind of html web page, composed in MS Word or Publisher, which I could update and upload periodically to my traditional web site. I was going to call it The View From Here. Then I learned there were things called blogs.

As of this item, I’ve posted 2700 times. Actually, it’s probably over 3000, because I had other blogs that lived briefly before Metaphor. I also have a blog that has lived concurrently with this one. But it’s published with a pseudonym, in the tradition of Benjamin Franklin’s Silence Dogood and and Richard Saunders. Dissent lives.

I started in March 2003, ranting against the imminent calamity of the Iraq war and George W. Bush’s arrogant and evil Shock and Awe. Times were hot for blogging. I got reaction to my pro-peace, anti-invasion posts. I even had people emailing me posts of their own, in complete disagreement and demanding that I publish them under some misguided fairness doctrine. That was funny. I suggested they get their own blogs. It’s free and easy.

Blogging is kind of fun sometimes. I find it much more satisfying than ripping off a Facebook mini-thought or a Tweet. I’m simply geared more like a Peterbilt than a Vespa.

Writing is for me a social, tribal endeavor, and blogging has enabled me to ride trains of thought that I never would have taken by any other means. I mean, there is nothing posted in this blog, as far as I know, that would have wound up in my journal if it hadn’t been shared here.

My journal is entirely different. It’s more of a list of events interspersed with mundane observation and self-deprecating snark. It’s a useful reference, but nobody would want to read it. I don’t. But it’s like a big mental backhoe, good for draining the swamp.

Are you a blogger too? If so, why? What do you like about it? What do you dislike about it? If you’ve tried it and given up blogging, or decided it’s not for you in the first place, I’d like to hear from you too.

You can drop a comment, or maybe you’d like to post something on your blog and leave a link in the comments. Or send me an e-mail with a comment or a link, and I’ll post it for you.