This has been an unusual week for blogging. I’ve discovered several new blogs and surprisingly a few of them have had links to each other or to blogs I already read, and yet I found them by following different paths. I was already marveling at the small town feeling the blogosphere had suddenly taken on when yesterday I sat down to read the paper and drink the morning pot of coffee.
When I reached the editorial page of the Austin American-Statesman, I noticed the column “Land of the Free-for-All” by Connie Shultz. The first sentence was “I hate blogs.” I found this to be quite intriguing. I love reading print columns that disparage blogs. They’re always so defensive. Perhaps, they know their days are numbered. I don’t think blogs will replace regular news sources since bloggers can’t afford to travel the world and do frontline reporting, but anyone can write commentary and many can write it better than syndicated columnists, and so it was with a snarky grin that I began reading.
Shultz doesn’t just hate blogs; she also loves them, and toward the end of her piece, she quoted from a few random blogs, one of which is on my blogroll: Postcards from the Mothership. I commented to let Dani know that her blog was mentioned, and now she has a very nice post up about the small world nature of the internet. Dani is a Canadian blogger whose blog is one of the first non-political blogs I came across while, as she mentions, looking for book reviews (she has a very cool and unique method for this). It’s these random connections and new friends we make with people in faraway places – and close to home – that so fascinates me about blogging. It seems to fulfill part of the promise of the web.
One more connection. Regular readers will notice the weekly link to Greyhound Pets of America’s central Texas chapter that shows the beautiful hounds up for adoption. Today, I saw that reader and occasional commenter Heather of Heather in all Her Strangeness is fostering one of these very dogs. This has nothing to do with me; it’s just one more interesting connection (and a chance to mention greyhounds).