The 'Why" On Blogs - Part 1

Lately I've been surfing around the blogosphere. That got me back to some 'why' questions about blogs. These, I had asked myself the very first time I made an acquaintance with the concept of blogging. I was told 'A blog is like a personal diary on the Internet'. I wondered why the heck would someone want to put up their personal diary on the Internet? I had an electronic personal diary at the time, but I could not imagine putting that up in the open for all to read, analyze and judge. Why? Because they were thoughts which needed to be expressed somewhere but were not suitable for public consumption. Mind you, some of the entries would definitely have ruffled many a feather! Isn't that why people write personal diaries in the first place - to let out your thoughts which you think you can't even share with your friends? And for all the other thoughts one wants to share, you always have friends and family. With this simple chain of thought, I happily concluded that blogging was only for some lonely souls who had no one to lend a ear to their thoughts and were trying to seek solace in the hope that their transmission in cyberspace would increase the chances of them being heard. I did create a blog to see what it was all about and blogged anonymously for a short while but I soon lost interest. Thus, after corroborating my theoretical conclusion with practical experience, I dismissed blogs from my online itinerary.
The time at which the above research was conducted was while I was in college, i.e. when I lived the majority of my life in the real world. Since I graduated and joined the software industry, I see many things (blogging included) in a different light. So if you were wondering, why the heck has this guy spent his time to write a blog post if he doesn't believe in the concept in the first place, I must tell you that the new light to which I was referring to earlier has led to newer thought chains and newer conclusions, which I shall elaborate on, in a subsequent post.