9/2/04
I was pleasantly surprised to receive a comment late last night/early this morning from my blogging neighbor, Peter. You'll notice in the upper right hand corner of this screen it says 'next blog.' Well, after Peter posted on his blog, he clicked that button and landed on my site, which is actually how most people come to this place. What's more, our neighbor to the virtual north (he also happens to live in Canada) put forth the effort not only to read, but to comment on my self-indulgently lengthy post. As our next door neighbor in the blogging community, Peter's practically family; he can hear us noisily arguing/flushing toilets/making love through the open windows during summer, dontcha know. And we listen to his barking dog while he's away at school.
I wonder what blog neighborhoods look like, anyway. Probably something like long chains of side-by-side row houses, except the rows aren't straight, because each time you post you get different neighbors. It's not that the old ones moved away, nor is it that you went anywhere different either; it's more like the rows get looped around and knitted into big synthetic communities with new neighbors at each posting intersection.
Anyway, Peter's a bit of an inspiration to me because he's managed to maintain his blog for about a year now, even as a busy married student. I don't know if I'll have the same amount of gumption and organization once fall term classes start for me later this month (come to think of it, I should be doing homework now).
A couple of days ago I googled myself (after closing the windows, of course) and found myself quoted in Ranking Blog due to my use of the word 'knitting' in my 'bloginette gets mail' post. That was my first clue, as a late-blooming, slow moving, grandmotherly type, that people scour the internet for key words and then feather their posts with other people's writing that they find interesting or amusing in some way. Also post lists of links to one another called blogrolls. Perhaps this is meant to somehow boost readership, or maybe it's just a means of creating an informal informational webring, or simply to streamline one's daily virtual kaffeeklatsches. I'm new to this stuff; I haven't gotten that far yet. I'm still slack jawed over the staggering numbers of people "out there" in the blogging community and the virtual roar of noise from the things they have to say and, in many, many cases DON'T have to say.
I'm also still very uncertain about this phenomenon I stumbled onto a few months ago. There's a whole 'nother parallel universe out there, fer sure.
