Microblogging has a new incarnation. Meet OhLife, the email based daily journal site.
Keeping track of your daily highs and lows is a great way to celebrate your successes and reminisce about good times in you life. Throughout history, people have kept diaries, and with all of the technology at our fingertips, keeping a daily journal is easier than ever. For some people, keeping track of their job search, their personal growth and even their relationship successes gives them a touchpoint for creating the story of their lives and can serve to be a reminder of what they have been through.
The problem is, it's so easy to forget to update a blog daily, and even a Twitter feed may not contain the things you really want to remember and you're limited to a specific number of characters. Not only that but any social networking site or blog isn't exactly private. To solve that problem, a new website OhLife has an innovative idea to keep people writing. The basic premise is that the site will email their subscribers daily, asking a simple question, “How did your day go?”. Users simply email their response to the question and it gets archived into the user's account. Eventually, people will have enough entries to order a book containing all of their journals.
Because the site was designed to be a place for private thoughts, there is no social component and you can't share your journals with Facebook, Twitter or any other social site. The idea, and the site for that matter, is pretty basic, but it seems to be an idea that could actually work. TechCrunch reported that 50% of people who answer the first email continue to post at least every other day. Speaking as someone who likes to start journals and forgets about them after a week, these numbers are surprising.
It seems like a great idea, but without the social component, it's hard to say if it will gain a very large fan base. But, keeping track of your thoughts while you cope with unemployment, an extended job search or any other stressful period in your life can keep your motivated and help you work through them. For example, when you can go back and see exactly what you were thinking when you decided to apply with a certain company, you can recall the excitement and carry that enthusiasm with you to the interview.
Whether you decide to microblog with a service like Twitter, keep a traditional blog or even a notebook or journal and a pen, keeping a diary can be a lot of fun. I think that just the simple process of spending a small amount of time each day to sort through your activities, hopes and how you feel about them can help you process them and keep your focus on your goals.
I would like to challenge everyone to keep a diary for a month, in whatever format you chose. I'm going try again, and maybe I'll stick to it this time.
Have you tried keeping a journal? Let me know in the comments.
By Melissa Kennedy- Melissa is a 9 year blog veteran and a freelance writer for PhillyJobsBlog, along with helping others find the job of their dreams, she enjoys computer geekery, raising a teenager, supporting her local library, writing about herself in the third person and working on her next novel.
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