Lost in the forest
I’ve been surfing the Internet, something I do more often now in my retirement, this time trying to get a handle on what weblogs are out here, and I’ve concluded that this post could be subtitled ‘What forest? Hell, what trees?’
As noted in an earlier post, Technorati tracks 75 million weblogs, and although it is the most popular, Yahoo lists it as only one of 61 blog catalogs. Number seven on the list tracks 10 million blogs.
As an experiment, I randomly picked the fifth on the list, BlogCatalog, and, again at random, went to the 125th page of writing blogs — each page holds 25 entries, so that page started at blog number 3,101. There I came across Being the Equator, a blog written by a smiling woman named Deb who describes herself as “relatively bright, moderately funny, (with) a spattering of creativity.”
Visit this site and you will see that the blogosphere is not all teenagers prattling about “American Idol”:
Deb looks like a teenager, but she’s 40, and her life hasn’t been easy — married at 21, a mother at 23, then, after earning undergraduate and graduate degrees, divorced at 34. Then about four years of the dating scene until a whirlwind marriage to her current husband. He’s a leukemia survivor who developed bipolar disorder from the radiation and chemotherapy, and his ex-wife is a witch trying to disrupt their lives. Now Deb’s mother is staying with them because she’s dying of cancer. Deb calls herself “The Equator” because she’s in the middle of everything, trying to “keep everyone on an even keel.”
I have no reason to doubt a word that Deb writes. In fact, I think she needs more than one blog.
In 38 years as a newspaper reporter and editor, I’ve read hundreds of thousands, no, make that millions of words, not to mention all the words I’ve written. Outside work, I’ve read everything from Homer to Herman Melville to Harper Lee, not to mention the Bible. But as I look around among the millions of blogs out here, I feel as overwhelmed as Deb the Equator.
It’s like being in a library without a Dewey Decimal System . . . no, without a card file index. To return to the forest metaphor, the underbrush is so thick, you can’t even see the trees.
What I think it’s all going to come down to is word-of-mouth. I tell you what I have found, you tell me what you have found. These days, it’s what they like to call networking. So let’s network.
– Sid Leavitt
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