The Book of Me-Mes

Before launching full-bore into a discussion on the Book of Us, I’d like to really focus on this blogging kick. Blogging is big, blogging is trendy, blogging is the latest craze for many scrapbookers. But before that was The Book of Me.

What’s interesting about all of this, from my perspective, is how Blogging is normally so introspective. There are so many scrap-bloggers out there getting into the whole journaling aspect, and recording their lives over the World Wide Web. But blogging, and the Book of Me were out there long before this circular journey that many scrapbookers are now seeming to make. Whilst the Book of Me was espousing the fact that we, as scrapbookers, should be including layouts or pages about “Me”, blogging in it’s many forms was doing just that - virtually. A case in point is the Me-Me trends through blogs.

For Additional Information On Memes, read this journal entry today.

Much of the Memes journey for bloggers is simply finding out about yourself. In fact, the 100 Things about Me Sub-meme was pretty much something that Angie proposed several years ago. Here’s a link to my own 100 things layout  which I created years ago now - and I bet you have one too. Like scrapbooking, blogging (or e-scrapbooking) is point in time. My 100 Things list of a few years ago needs updating now. The 100 Things About Me List that I linked to in the above Memes discussion, was created a few weeks back - and I really want to change some of them again, as my life has changed in perspective once more of late.

There are other blogging trends which link directly into many of the subjects that we found in the Book of Me.

Take a look at some of these trends here

These goal lists, to-do lists and the interesting Enclyclopedia of an Ordinary Life as a concept seem to be pretty much up there when dealing with introspective layouts such as those on ourselves.

So - is blogging a re-discovery of many of the proposals from the original Book of Me? It certainly helps maintain that introspection necessary to venture into creating layouts about myself. Perhaps this is worth a discussion in itself…

 

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Additional Blog Readings:

• On Blogging Memes - discussing the meme phenomenum which is sweeping the net, with examples from the scrapbooking world also.
• Other Me Stuff - discussing further meme-like developments which are helping bloggers out such as lists, websites for photo-blogging etc.

Sequel Blog Entry:

From Me-Mes to Us-Us’s

Update on Saturday, April 30, 2005 at 02:30PM by Angie Pedersen

I suppose it could be called a re-discovery of complimentary themes, in that many of the ideas have already been offered, as you said — but I think of it more like blogging is a format that people finally “get”.  Whatever the reason, this media/medium clicks for a larger population, allowing them to document their thoughts, in a way that Book of Me didn’t initially.  Somehow Book of Me came across or was perceived (by some, not all) as “selfish” or “self-centered”, and while blogging is very similar, and rather self-centered at its very premise, it clicked.  I don’t really care why that’s the case.  As I said in my interview with you: “When I struggle with a sense of lack of recognition, I remind myself that the whole point of the book is to inspire and encourage people to scrapbook about themselves. People are doing just that, and more start every day. That means the book has been a success, and I have accomplished what I set out to do.”  (Yea me!  ;) )