When explaining blogging to the interested but ignorant, I always give them a skewed picture. Once I showed them research blogs and got questions about why nobody used this medium for personal expression. Another time I showed them personal weblogs and was told that it was a pity it was impossible to use blogs for any serious purpose. I show them student and teaching blogs and I’m asked why there are no researcher’s blogs. I show them the blogs of presidential candidates and politicians and technologists and they tell me that there’s no daring in blogs, they’re conversationalists, blandly censored without the gut emotions that a novelist would dare write on a page or a lovesick girl in her locked diary, there’s none of the agony of a suicide note.

And there is. There’s all this, and more. And it’s quite impossible to show in 45 minutes. I don’t know how to convey it. You need to walk this country to see it.