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01/14/2005: "Blog Explosion"

After reading hundreds of blogs through Blog Explosion, I've discovered a few things:

  • Most people are really boring with the titles of their blogs. Everything is "Random/Everyday Confessions/Musings/Thoughts From My (enter self-depreciating adjective here) Mind/Brain/Life."

  • Bloggers do not consider their blogs to be their own websites that just happen to contain a blog, as the girls here at Kallure do. It's simply a "blog," and any pages with photos on it is a "photo blog," any pages with creative writing on it is a "writing/story blog," and so on. It's all gotten a little too blog-happy.

  • There is a special blog lingo, and I still don't understand it. Words I don't have any clue about include "trackback" and "meme."

  • There is something called "blog drama." I'm absolutely dying to find out what "blog drama" is, especially since I've seen grown men blog about it. I've had this webpage since 2002, and the most dramatic it's ever gotten was when I switched from a subdomain on Kallure to this domain name and I couldn't get the CGI files for Greymatter and the guestbook to work without some massive surgery. (And someone might note that over a year later, the guestbook is still down...)

  • Bloggers call their layouts and designs "skins." Maybe it has something to do with how it's put on the page?

  • A buttload of blog readers use Mozilla. How the hell did this happen, and WTF does my precious HTML look like in it? (Enter panic attack and rantings about the need for one uniform browser here)

  • Blogs that just provide links to other places without much commentary just suck.

  • Blogs that are highly personal and discuss explosive feuds with family members or having the cops break up the blogger's panty-less spanking at a public sex club make me feel like a filthy peeping tom.

  • Blogs that are solely about a baby don't make much sense to me. It's fantastic for friends and family members, but why would Random Person A want to read about Random Person B's baby drooling for the first time?

    Will and Grace was boring tonight. Thumbs down. Scrubs is finally back on next week. Thumbs up.

    Replies: 6 Comments

    Hi Brooke, thanks for participating in my blog! You rock!

    jazz, Friday, January 14th

    Bravo! Said something similar on my blog, but still: couldn't have said it better myself.

    CriticalDarling, Friday, January 14th

    Found you through BE. Just to let you know I am using Mozilla and your HTML came through fine. Have a great day.

    Darrell, Saturday, January 15th

    Trackbacks are great. If you blog about something that I want to expand on, I'd put in a trackback link to your blog post so that you would know I was talking about your post. :)
    Memes are fun too, especially www.tuesdayischooseday.com.

    I call them skins but I'm not sure why. I guess it's a carryover from my WinAmp days? lol

    Blog Drama is awful. Especially if it concerns the BOB Awards.

    I use FireFox exclusively now... because it's just a better browser. Your page looks a little off. Unless it's supposed to have a white background?? Either way, you should give FireFox a try. :) It won't hurt! I promise!

    Not sure if you're still using GM or not, but you might want to have a look at WordPress or maybe b2evolution. :) I always hated rebuilding files and having the template code spread out. Of course it might have changed since them.

    Anyway! Sorry to write a book. You had great observations. :)

    Miss Sass, Saturday, January 15th

    Weblog designs picked up the name "skins" -- similar to winamp skins -- because, when using web design standards, the entire layout and look of the weblog could be switched out simply by changing a stylesheet. Some weblogs had multiple stylesheets and let users switch between them.

    Browsers *are* pretty uniform now, but you have to adhere very closely to the standards. MSIE 6, Mozilla, and Firefox are very faithful to web standards. www.alistapart.com has some good articles on this topic.

    John, Tuesday, January 18th

    You're lucky, Brooke. We highschoolers are only allowed to blog about our EMO/punk/goth lifes and how we all want to die because the one we love is madly in love with another person. Oh, and we're allowed to write about how we're going to cut ourselves and type out hate songs as well, but thats about it.

    Oh Xanga, you and your highschool population makes me sick.

    Lindsay, Friday, January 21st