Dear Diary...

It's nearly the end of the day and I'm trying to write at least one post a day on this thing. Which makes the whole process feel a bit like keeping a diary. Hmm...maybe that's why blogs were invented? Must check.

Anyway, this blog/diary thing got me thinking. How does a blog compare to a diary in terms of revealing what the author is thinking/doing at the time? There is a fantastic compilation of diary entries from various people throughout history, called The Assassin's Cloak. (If only I could get the hang of the link thing ...it's probably on Amazon). The aim of the book is to give you a snapshot of a year or a century through some revealing diary entry of a contemporary person. A lot of these diaries were not intended for publication and are therefore assumed to be very revealing. But a blog is available for public consumption...how truthful/accurate will it be? Is it like Hansard, the Parliamentary record, which MPs are allowed to 'preview' before publication so that they can edit their grammar and stuff, but not change the sense of. Or is it like the kind of 'at home' photo opportunity that politicians use to make us think their domestic life is totally harmonious?

Someone where I work is developing a programme idea using the diaries of famous people when they were younger and re-enacting various formative passages from their lives in a kind of 'Everybody Loves Chris' style. It might get picked up, but because I work in television and have an in-built jealousy of other people's possible success, I am thinking about a better idea comparing the blog and the diary as a window into a person's life and times. Some people will have kept a diary as a teenager and then a blog as an adult - which is more revealing? Many people today still write diaries, but do their accounts reflect contemporary events better than somebody else keeping a blog throughout the same period?

I reckon this idea has a better chance of success because it has a computer/internet-y word in it - 'blog' and 'the web' and User Generated Content are like catnip to broadcasters now, so all I need is about 30 bloggers who also kept a diary to read this and get in touch. Oh and I probably need to make it sound interesting

Comments

[peter]

Hi Richard

The book is published by Canongate. On their site (which I produced) there is a daily extract from the book on this page. But it was a long time before RSS!

http://www.canongate.net/AssassinsQuote

[Marcus Brown]

Hello Richard,

I burnt my dairy. It's gone for ever. Never coming back.

Bloody good job too.

[Rich]

Thank you for the comments.
You probably know that Russell Davies, who kindly gave me a great plug on his blog, has discovered some people on the web are slagging him off, basically for using his blog like a diary. I'm hoping Russell keeps it going because it's his honesty which sets it apart form a lot of the stuff out there.