Blogs: Your #1 source for absolutely nothing

About five years ago, the popularity of personal websites was booming. Everyone with a buddy list had their own website. It was a simple site, with a few pictures, some text, and some outdated information that no one ever read. Since then, the birth and the growing epidemic of kids who realize they have opinions have replaced the humble personal web page. Enter the internet blog.

Some blog sites would like to maintain the image of being an online diary, but diaries are personal. The purpose of a diary is to write to your self, but most people don’t blog for themselves. I won’t say that everyone is out to impress or gain something from their blog. I do realize that some people blog for absolutely no reason at all, and it shows through their incredibly interesting content.

The three most popular personal blog sites are LiveJournal, Xanga, and MySpace. Through careful study and asinine generalizations, I will explain the different types of bloggers using each of the three sites.

LiveJournal: The types of users who choose LiveJournal vary widely. There are those that talk about their day and nothing more. Sometimes, you’re blessed with the opportunity to read a huge block of text lacking paragraph separations and any shred of an attempt at proper grammar, spelling, or punctuation.

In LiveJournal, there is a feature that allows you to do what is called an “LJ cut.” An LJ cut is an html tag that lets you take your very long entries and link them to a separate page, taking up less space on your page and your friends’ pages. LJ cuts make it easier for people to ignore your very bad entry.

The next category of LiveJournal bloggers are commonly known as pseudo-intellectuals. These are the type of people who you would swear were writing a dissertation to a kindergartener via the internet. The entries are filled with a variety of seldom-used words containing multiple syllables. Congratulations, Frasier. I’m impressed.

Pseudo-intellectuals can cover a variety of subjects. Religion, philosophy, politics, and literature are among the many. Kudos to those who actually know what they are talking about. However, if you’ve been reading, you’ll know that you must avoid an LJ cut if you want anyone to even skim through your block of self-loving garble.

Then, there are the cynics. These are the people who use their blog as a place to post insensitive, heartless, and often very funny comments. As long as it’s done in good taste, I don’t mind reading a few cynical thoughts every day. Unfortunately, my friends post nothing of the sort.

Finally, there are the most hated of all bloggers: The quiz whores. Does anyone care what flavor ice cream you are? Why would anyone else want to know what "Napoleon Dynamite" character you’re most like? And I certainly don’t care what your IQ is, being based off of a 35 question quiz from a site that spams my inbox twice a day.

Xanga: When I think of a Xanga user’s blog, I envision a bright pink background, several blocks of unformatted text, and the current music always set to Kelly Clarkson.

When you take away this exaggerated generalization, Xanga has the same type of users as LiveJournal. However, Xanga appears to be dominated by the junior high female crowd, and therefore I must leave it at that. And on the subject of “eProps,” well, I’m just not going to go there.

MySpace: MySpace basically has two types of people: 14 year old girls and emo kids.

14 year old girls who feel they have outgrown Xanga devote all of their time to MySpace. They will generally have more MySpace friends than their city’s population, and nearly 90 percent of them will be male college guys they’ve never met. They probably love the way the guy’s hair falls over his nicely painted black eye sockets in such a nonchalant manner, or maybe he just has a band.

Speaking of which, emo kids, who dominate the rest of the MySpace population, are very unique and talented. Their image, which seems so natural, is actually forced and premeditated for every webcam shot. No one can tell.

Their words of sadness and suffering are so deep and poetic. It brings a tear to my eye when I read about their friend’s girlfriend’s roommate’s dad who drinks. It’s like you can see into the pool of emotions that is their soul when you read that poem about the time they were judged. When you finally see it through the eyes of such a person, you can’t help but agree that the world sucks and everyone in it is doomed. In the words of Ben Folds, “Y’all don’t know what it’s like being male, middle class, and white.”

And thank you, emo kid, for embedding that auto-playing music video in your MySpace page. It was so much better than what I was trying to listen to.

In the world of internet blogging, one can gain enlightenment through considering who and what they are blogging for. If you do blog for only yourself, a word processor is a good option. Finally, I apologize if you don’t fit into any of these categories. Perhaps you are using the wrong blog site.

I’ve always been perplexed at the astonishing coincidence in a blogger’s current music relating so much to his or her thoughts. Someone complaining about a boy calling her ugly might be listening to Christina Aguilera’s “Beautiful.” A person who had a bad day will no doubt be listening to Fuel’s “Bad Day.” It’s absolutely amazing. They must have the "iPod Psychic". I bet it’s like $899.