The difficulty is that I may not have time to comment on it, or I may glance at it and find it uninteresting, and so I am left in an awkward position. The same issues arise, mutatis mutandis , in sharing one's own work. In short, the ability to find out what someone else is doing, without mutual knowledge of what's happening, is a boon to both parties. This non-mutuality of knowledge is one of the characteristics that makes social hypertext different from more direct forms of communication. Note that while personal portrayal is a new type of usage of the web, it is very ordinary behavior in the real world.
People go to considerable effort and expense to manage their appearance.
The World Wide Web is one of the first venues where individuals can construct portrayals of themselves using information rather than consumer goods as their palette. If personal pages are indeed a new manifestation of the human impulse to manage personal representations, then we need only look at markets like cosmetics and clothing to get an idea of the force behind this impulse. One reflection of the social importance of personal portrayal can be found in the kinds of debate it occasions. At Apple there was considerable internal debate preceding the decision to allow members of the Advanced Technology Group to make their personal pages available on the public web. An initial veto by upper management met with vigorous protest from the researchers.