A recurring trend among bloggers is meta-blogging: blogging about blogging. My pristine AI model---namely, my own brain---spotted another variation of this pattern in the RSS feed reader this month, and since I like all things meta except for a certain company called Meta, I want in on it. Here's a short summary of statements I very much align with.

• Kev Quirk made friends thanks to blogging.
• Frank Meeuwsen links Punkrock Publishing to naive blogging optimism.
• Frank also promotes blogging as a cozy social place for the web.
• Roy Tang compares social media, lurkers, introverts, and blogging.
• Ruben Schade receives too many emails from his readers.
• Ruben also finds what's up with bloggers all those years later.
• Manuel Moreale writes about the people behind their blogs.
• Joel Chrono invited his readers to ask him anything.
• Ben Werdmuller ponders on long-term effects of blogging.
• Tracy Durnell summarizes what she's gotten out of 20 years of blogging.

I'm sure I've missed a few, feel free to send in more related posts.

As for myself, in 2021 I've already proclaimed the triumph of blogging that netted wonderful friends that I still converse with to this day, had me join random Zoom meetings, inspires and expands my thinking, and had me writing and sending letters through snail mail. Looking at the above articles of fellow bloggers, I can only conclude that Blogging Nets More Than Just Text: it slowly but surely builds up a following, grows both shallow and deep friendships, keeps you on your toes, constructs a digital archive of your many previous selves, ...

Although my online presence dates back to 1998, Brain Baking is ten years old, of which I only started taking up blogging seriously six years ago. Most of the above articles focus on the social gains, but seem to undervalue having a wholesome online part of the internet just for yourself. I'm the biggest fan of Brain Baking and Jefklak's Codex: I regularly look up and re-read my own writings---not just as a digital knowledge garden where pieces of ideas are be stored that later can be twisted and turned into something else entirely, but also to relive that feeling of that particular period in my life. A blog is also a personal time capsule.

On top of that, as a non-native English speaker and writer, blogging in English immensely helped in mastering the English language where exotic diction, word order, weird hyphenation, wrongly literally translated proverbs, and the Oxford comma reign supreme.

I tip my hat to all fellow bloggers out there. I had to look up the correct usage for tipping that hat, but don't let that stop you from writing (or tipping?) that, given enough patience, will grow into something more than just text.