In the olden days before the internet was quite so prevalent in daily life as it is now – ie around 15 years ago for most people! – when you wanted to record your innermost thoughts, you might have kept a writtern journal or diary. At various stages of my life, I have kept a daily record of activities and thoughts I’d had, sometimes expanding these thoughts a little so they were more than simple jottings and factual records of events that had taken place.

There has, indeed, been a long tradition of people writing diaries, with some people (usually those with some claim to celebrity) publishing them for mass consumption – eg Samuel Pepys, Tony Benn, Michael Palin etc. And certainly, it seems the appetite for people to record their daily lives is undiminished in the 21st century, though nowadays you are more likely to keep up with people’s thoughts and activities on a perpetual basis through such social media sites as Facebook and Twitter.

So do people still write what was originally known as a “weblog” – blog – in the same manner as they were writing diaries? Of course, as with most things to do with the internet, the answer is “yes and no”. From the earliest days of people keeping an online journal using things such as usenet in the 80s and early 90s, through to the advent of services such as Blogger and eventually the microblogging services such as Twitter, there is clearly an appetite for people to write down the things they get up to and the thoughts they have about these things.

But my own belief is that, if you wish to write down your thoughts for private consumption, you should indeed keep a private journal (which can, of course, be an online one that is set to private so only you can read it). Whereas the 2014 version of a blog is primarily for providing info for public consumption, rather than a simple record of activity. Certainly, from a business perspective, this is how you should be viewing your blog and thus populating it with content accordingly.