This probably won't be a terribly profound observation to anyone deeply involved in the blogosphere, but it strikes me that blogs are an exceptional metaphor for life. You try to do something every day -- interesting, productive, entertaining, silly, anything. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes you do it alone even though you really wish someone else was along for the ride. Sometimes it's meaningless to you, but it touches someone else deeply. Sometimes you pour your heart out and the world shrugs.
What have you done for me lately? Whatever you do or write or say today will be gone in a week. Oh sure, Google's All-Seeing Eye has filed it away somewhere, and Indiana Jones might dig through your archives for a golden nugget he's heard rumors of, but the past is past. The world moves on -- ashes to ashes, dust to dust.
You've got to always press on, looking for some new witticism, something Important that no one else has noticed, or at least a story that makes you smile. The river of time washes 7 days ago over the waterfall at the bottom of the screen, but if you swim fast enough you can beat the current. Check the news, check the blogs, what's going on today? Hey, look around, maybe something funny happened to you on the way to your keyboard.
Writing is history. That is, the only history that exists is what gets written down. Is there a Deep Thought on the tip of your brain? Better write it down, because tomorrow it'll be gone and you won't even remember that you lost something. Write it with a pen or pencil, write it with bits and bytes, write it with a camera or microphone. Bind it, post it, burn it to CD. Your kids will want to know what you were like Back In The Day, and you want to have more than a high school graduation photo to show them. What if they could not only read your mind, but travel through time and see what you were thinking about on July 11th, 2003? Yeah, I had some crazy ideas back then. You know, we'd be great friends even if we weren't flesh and blood.
Very well said. I keep a notepad with me everywhere I go for jotting down ideas for new articles, and I archive my blog daily, since it's the only form of written record I keep.
I imagine one day I'll hand the discs to my kids and try to convince them that they're actually interested in reading what their old man had to say when he was young. =)