I don't journal much (obviously) and I never have. I used to hate the assignments in school where we were required to keep diaries and make entries every day. I still go for very long stretches without journaling. I think I like my memories transient.
However, I use LJ as a way to communicate with friends, hopefully many friends, at one time. I post fiction to my journal, mostly of the fanfic variety, as I actually nurse hopes that anything original I could come up with might actually be publishable - hah, hah. But I keep that stuff out of the public view, anyway, just in case. And I use it to share other things - treatises, articles, funnies - with people, as I find blogging that stuff a lot less invasive than spamming everyone on an email distribution list.
Mostly, I see blogging as a highly different act from journaling. Journaling, to me, has always been about exploring one's inner voice and using the internal monologue to sort out and capture the myriad facets of one's consciousness. I don't really need to indulge in an inner exploration very often - I find that I'm usually pretty capable of sorting out my Id from my Ego all by myself, thanks, and if I do need to talk it out, I usually want to talk to someone else, not just myself. (I think I can count on one hand the number of times I've used my own journal for this.)
Blogging, however, is a different animal because unless you lock down those types of posts and make them private or tightly friends-locked, you're setting all that out there in public. I think the second or third entry in my journal was a rant I posted when I forgot - oops - that LJ's are public, unless you set them not to be. I don't like the idea of blogging so that only one set of friends can see it, which is another reason I'm generally selective about what I blog. In fact, the only times I really filter is if there's something I need to tell people, but don't want *everyone* to know. For example, I set up a filter when a friend's mother died, to try to coordinate something for the family. I have some filters by interest, but I generally don't use them much.
There are the posts one makes in order to preserve a record of something someone saw, overheard, etc. - and I would say that this is the primary reason I blog for personal purposes, other than archiving fiction and the like.
Sure!
However, I use LJ as a way to communicate with friends, hopefully many friends, at one time. I post fiction to my journal, mostly of the fanfic variety, as I actually nurse hopes that anything original I could come up with might actually be publishable - hah, hah. But I keep that stuff out of the public view, anyway, just in case. And I use it to share other things - treatises, articles, funnies - with people, as I find blogging that stuff a lot less invasive than spamming everyone on an email distribution list.
Mostly, I see blogging as a highly different act from journaling. Journaling, to me, has always been about exploring one's inner voice and using the internal monologue to sort out and capture the myriad facets of one's consciousness. I don't really need to indulge in an inner exploration very often - I find that I'm usually pretty capable of sorting out my Id from my Ego all by myself, thanks, and if I do need to talk it out, I usually want to talk to someone else, not just myself. (I think I can count on one hand the number of times I've used my own journal for this.)
Blogging, however, is a different animal because unless you lock down those types of posts and make them private or tightly friends-locked, you're setting all that out there in public. I think the second or third entry in my journal was a rant I posted when I forgot - oops - that LJ's are public, unless you set them not to be. I don't like the idea of blogging so that only one set of friends can see it, which is another reason I'm generally selective about what I blog. In fact, the only times I really filter is if there's something I need to tell people, but don't want *everyone* to know. For example, I set up a filter when a friend's mother died, to try to coordinate something for the family. I have some filters by interest, but I generally don't use them much.
There are the posts one makes in order to preserve a record of something someone saw, overheard, etc. - and I would say that this is the primary reason I blog for personal purposes, other than archiving fiction and the like.