This is a fantastic video from Bob Geldof. The start of this video just really hit me… Not just because of myself but what I saw when I used to talk to my friend who sadly commited suicide a month ago.

It is well worth a watch for anyone! The ending is the part that just made me cry. It shows the effect this has on everyone involved.

What is blogging now? When I first started back in 2001 it was just a way to log your daily lives or moan about something that effects you… You had big company workers writing up about how their company sucked, people trying to work out their own issues… These days its turned into a way for people to claim how much money they make and write up paid reviews. Blogging has lost its personality and is now just turning into the old websites we had crammed down our necks.

Can you really tell me the difference between a website and a blog now? You could have a few years ago but now… You will be hard pushed to look up on a blog directory and not have the biggest “blogs” be marketing type or some form of sales type website.

I only read a few blogs now, mainly because no one apart from a few really do blog, you see no real personality behind the blog apart from someone rubbing their hands together trying to find some sneaky way of getting some extra dollars out of you.

The reason I was wondering is this I just checked my RSS reader and went through all my feeds and cleaned out everything that sucked… I am now down to only 4 feeds!

1. One of them is a clasic (PostSecret) which is all about real blogging (With pics).
2. The other is a blog I found around a year ago and has one of the biggest real personalitys around (Rebellious Arab Girl ®).
3. The other is a blog I sadly need to really catch up on Its called I am You and was one of my fave reads a quite a few months back… I really need to go back and atch up (Like I do with Rebellios)
4. The next is a blogger/Auther/Comic Aurther (Neil Gaiman’s Journal) who always manages to amaze me. He has no real need to blog but does it for the sole reason of what Blogging is meant to be about… Expressing yourself.

I did have a lot of feeds from very good authers… Sadly most have now closed or just died Did they die from just personal reasons? Maybe… But I also think its because these real blogs get less exposure and no real way to find blogs to connect too.
Yes you have many sites such as BlogCatalog and Entrecard to use… But they get flooded with spam and end up being run with the “Blog v2″ spam sites and just old fasioned websites but with a blog identity.

So this is just something for everyone to think about:

Are you really running a blog? (Blog = Web Log)