There are a growing number of these around, but this is the first one made by a friend: noahjoaquin.com, a most excellent baby blog.
Yes, the idea is now being commercialized by babyblog.com but the site name indicates the entrepreneurs there don’t appreciate how grand the idea can be: A blog for life, a present from the parents back to the child as it grows older, one to which the kid starts contributing drawings, then writings; eventually it becomes a group blog, a place for family holiday reports, or elegies to deceased pets. During the teenage years, it’s a place for articulated selfabsorption — at college, for reporting back to the parents. Eventually, it’s time to start a new baby blog.
I wonder what effect such a public platform for self-expression would have on children, especially if it is interactive, with positive feedback from grandparents and teachers. Kids must get as much out of it as we do, surely?
See also http://www.henrysdiary.com.
Though he doesn’t hint at it, I think some web-related weirdness sparked Mike to quit keeping a public log of Henry’s doings. But it remains the best ode to a new child yet.
How would you know what its like to get positive feedback on your blog?
Anyway, can’t imagine anything worse. The twittish ramblings of your eight year old self are the last things you’d want on a searchable online database at the age of thriteen.
yeah, that’s right. here’s a case in point. now i do remember commenting on that, and not in a nice way, and I was not alone. stefan, where are the comments we all made?
hmm. that didn’t work. try http://www.stefangeens.com/000168.html and have a laugh anyway
So I’m reduced to writing for a bunch of involuntary luddites, who couldn’t find a comment if it fell in their laptop. For whom the less than sign is a mystery. And Charles, I want that red t-shirt you borrowed in 1994 back. Now.
Sorry, Stefan, it’s given up the ghost. Been reduced to a rag-toy for the cat.
By the way, why does your fancy geolocatormajig think that Eurof’s in Lithuainia and you can’t be found?
We pay them more than you. I’ll take the equivalent in any color t-shirt currency.
no seriously, where are the many many comments we all attached to your hilarious AI movie review in 2001? none of them were particularly sparkling, but i spent a long time writing them, and i want to see them.
They’re appended to the story as part of the story. I had to do that when I migrated from Blogger to Movable Type. Not that you’d know what that previous sentence meant or anything