When I found out that I would be blogging multiple times a
week for the next several weeks I thought this would be pretty difficult since
I have zero blogging experience. But then the other day I thought to myself,
“Wasn’t Xanga a blog site?” And sure enough it was. For those of you who do not
know, Xanga was a social media site that was fairly popular back in 2005, right
before MySpace’s success. Of course back then, being a silly little teenager
and all, I never thought of it as blogging, I would just post a quick thought,
what I was doing, a picture or video, and people could comment and subscribe to
my page. There were also groups on the site you could join/subscribe to where
you could also find other peoples pages and subscribe to them.
As I thought more into it I came to the realization that
Facebook is the new Xanga. Whenever I made a post on Xanga rarely would I post
something that was just paragraphs long. It would typically be the length of a
tweet or Facebook post for example, “Just got into from school. Today sucked.
Time for homework.” And simply just because of those three sentences I started
conversations and made friends with people all over the country. Joining/subscribing
to groups was a lot similar to todays “liking” a group, and of course subscribing
to peoples pages was just like adding the person as a friend. So not only did I
start blogging way back when I sort of got a head start before most people. Now
if only I could get this whole writing thing down pact.
Not to say I’m a terrible writer, I’m not a great either,
however with Twitter only allowing 140 characters I’m so used to summing up
what I have to say in the fewest words possible. Now I get to elaborate on what
I’m saying, thanks to the freedom of this blog, so I can go on a rant and take
my reader in my world, to see clearly understand me. Or I can keep it short and sweet, not 140 characters though.
I had a xanga too! I never really used it for blogging though you are right thats definitely what it was intended for. I would post like one "cool" picture that I thought would make me look awesome. When was that? Sixth grade? I remember when everyone switched from xanga to Myspace and then Myspace to Facebook. Slowly it has become Facebook to Twitter too. It's weird to watch everything evolve.
ReplyDeleteWow, Xanga. I remember not knowing what this social media outlet was, and actually it's coming in slightly fuzzy now. My best friend from my hometown in Maryland shared this site with me as a way to connect even after I moved to Ohio. I explored it a bit around the year 2006 and it seemed adequate enough to utilize. I am pretty sure I still have the account out there. Seeing things come and go just as Julie mentioned is odd but fascinating. Thanks for the blast from the past; I can only imagine how much I used it and it would be interesting to see. Cracking the code, on the other hand, would be an adventure itself.
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