The Otakusphere: Impz’s brief history of the world (or at least all of the world that matters)

You can blame Impz, Martin, Bateszi, Hige, Lythka, Author and Michael for this post.

Really, I know a collective groan goes up anytime someone starts talking about "the community". But after reading Impz's brief history of the Otakusphere (that's still my word for the anime blogosphere), Kabitizin's interviews and Os's new blogging initiative (which is really cool by the way), it has made me wonder.

Why do we blog?

And I'm not going to talk about why I blog, because frankly, no one cares, but I'm curious about the stories from everyone else. How did you get started? Why did you start? Did you do research or did you just jump in? What type of niche do you try to get into? And probably, most importantly:

What do you get out of it?

As far as the readers of the blogs, who don't have blogs of their own, what do you get out of reading them? Do you normally read for news or opinions or both?

Really, I'd like people to leave comments or leave links to posts of their own. I'm curious.