Daily Blague

At some point yesterday, my NewsGator feeds stopped coming in - and I was too preoccupied with my own stuff to notice. I rely on NewsGator to tell me when certain favorite sites have been updated (when new entries have been posted, that is), and I ought to have been suspicious about everybody's being so quiet, but, hey, it's summer. In fact, almost everybody had posted something "while I was out." Speedy commenter that I try to be, I felt that I'd been very rude.

And what was I doing? Exploring the Blogosphere. It's certainly not Web surfing, and it's not fun, although it can be very interesting. I am working on a taxonomy of the kinds of blogs that interest me. Parenting blogs, expat blogs, satirical blogs. Political blogs of course, even though I don't spend much time visiting them these days. Taxonomy is always somewhat arbitrary, I know. Are blogs written by openly gay people, for example, "gay blogs"? I'm not even sure that there is such a thing as a gay community, anymore than there is a straight community. But I want to get a grip on the virtual geography; all too human, I can't allow the chaos to swirl untended. My method is to run through all of the links on an interesting blog's roster of presumably interesting links. Some sites don't hold my attention for very long, but a surprising (and taxing) number do. I don't believe that it has ever before been possible to witness the variety of human existence that a voyage among blogs makes manifest. If you don't look closely, everybody looks more or less the same - everybody is, after all, writing. But get closer and the uniqueness becomes palpable. Everywhere and all the time, there are people living, feeling, and expressing themselves. Of course we know this, but to see it is fearful, just as having a momentary sense of the size of the universe can be overwhelming.

What's this? NewsGator just popped: something new at Sale Bête.