Blogging about blogs

Well an article on BBCi got me thinking about blogs. The other day I had to take a survey and it asked me how many times a month do you have to explain to someone what a blog is. Someone I know who is in college, uses a computer for research and email and everything else hadn't heard of blogs either. Whatever you want to call it, a weblog, blog, online journal or bjournal, it's the same thing. A dynamic webpage that someone can easily post whatever they want to post. Now even AOL is joining the trend and will include it in their software. Wow, even though blogs seem like they are so mainstream, there are many many people out there who have no idea what it is. That amazes me. I think everyone who blogs or reads blogs regularly thinks that everyone else must know about blogs. And that's where we get back to the very self-centered world that blogs are. A blogger thinks, well I know about blogs, everyone else must, just like they think that I care whether or not they had frosted flakes for breakfast this morning. Some blogs are interesting and not so self-centered/agrandizing as other blogs.....I really don't care what you did at the beach or what car you rode in, unless it's something really funny, which most of the time it's not. There are some great reader's comments on this article:

"Never managed to get past the first sentence of a 'blog'. Boring self indulgent drivel."
"The bloggers I am already aware of seem to have all the time in the world to sit and write their hubristic and self-opinionated garbage...."
"The problem with blogs like mine is that they aren't very interesting and people don't tend to care about other's people's private musings."

I don't know if I would go as far as one person quoted in the BBC article, that blogging is the democratisation of publishing. I think right now we're seeing the boom that comes with any new thing. When cars were being first manufactured there were dozens of different manufacters, now most cars seem to be made by four different international companies and their subsidiaries. Personal home pages used to be all the rage, then we realized that the information quickly got stale and it's a pain to constantly re-code a page and find new information to put up. Blogs allow people an easy way to change the look of their page and post new information, but how many people really want to read about what someone ate for breakfast and the cool car they got to ride in over the week-end? Like all rages, I think this too will die out.

Yes, I recognize the irony in me blogging about this.

Now to be self-centered. I was told today that I lead a glamourous lifestyle. I don't know what part of my life is glamourous. Is it chasing a frisbee while sweating from the heat or if it's waking up at 7am to strap a 40lbs tank to my back? I went to a phat pad this week-end and that was glamour and not something I do everyweek-end. We're talking Resevoir Rd/Georgetown/Mt. Vernon phat pad. I went to a party that was in a house that was easily a few million. Had a pool, catered food and many gay men. I even got to see a cock ring, a double at that. That was great. Now, I know someone has a lot of money when they can have their bathroom painted completely in trompe l'oeil with the illusion of wood paneling and protraits of dogs hanging on the wall. Yes, it would have been cheaper for them just to put wood panneling up and find portraits of dogs, but the effect of walking into a bathroom and realizing that it probably cost more than a year my college for them to have a trompe l'oeil mural painted on four walls of the bathroom. It's subtle, you don't realize it at first, then it's hits you in the face that the people who live here are loaded. Now that's money.