the reason it's weird and offends people is because public journals themselves are a really bizarre and recent phenomenon in the first place. previously people kept journals (for the most part) because they wanted a personal and private record of their own thoughts and experiences, not because they intended for other people to read it. online journals differ drastically from this in that the ulterior motive suddenly isn't to keep a personal account but to make your personal experiences into a public source of entertainment and feedback for everyone else. this is a pretty recent phenomenon and it's kind of interesting that so many people's immediate responses to important events now are to publish it in some sort of public format when the mediums for doing so barely even existed 20 or so odd years ago, people just wrote it down and somehow were content with the fact that probably no one else except them would ever read it. for now i think nearly anyone trying to maintain a blog would have a lot of trouble with regards to offending other people because we really take for granted how recent the idea of having a blog even is to begin with, the social norms regarding privacy and space and what's appropriate and so on haven't caught up yet.