Tuesday, November 21, 2006

Surfing the blogs

I noticed Blogspot's random surfing options, so I've been skipping through the blogspotosphere.

Wow, what a wealth of different stuff. My only objection is to the blogs that block out the "Next Blog" button. Screw them; hit that Alt-Left Arrow combo and go to the next one. There ought to be a law.

Most blogs seem to fall into fairly well defined categories.

  • Vanity blogs
    These are usually by Moms, Students, and 15-30 year old Single Females. The Moms often have some really interesting recipes with photographic documentation.

    The Studes mostly seem to be really, really bummed out, dude.

    The SF's share fascinations with hair, nails, shopping, sex, being sad, and dating and/or the absence thereof, not necessarily in that order. Some of them seem a little self-involved. Maybe that's why the Studes are bummed out.

  • Non-English blogs
    These are hard to figure out since I speekee only English. I usually skip them unless they have some quality art work. Some of them do.

  • My Internet Business blogs
    For some strange reason, many people seem to have simultaneously latched on to the delusion that they can make money by putting up a free blog and trying to sell stuff. Haven't they heard about EBay?

    There must be a book out there pushing this screwball idea. Something like, "How To Use The Internet To Make A Million And Not Really Do Anything".

    Maybe I'll put some click-through ads on my blog in hopes that the one person a month who accidentally lands here could potentially make me 2 or 3 cents.

  • Blogs in English by bloggers for whom English is not a primary language
    Most of these are pretty interesting and not that difficult to figure out. Here's an example.

  • Religious blogs
    At last! People with the God-given wisdom to show not only me, but everyone else in the world, the error of our ways.

    To be fair, many of these are the sincere musings of people grappling with the intricacies of their faith. You decide.

  • Family blogs
    Many of these are by young married couples with new babies (lots of pictures). They often report on their chronic sleep deprivation. Many of them feature posts written as if they were authored by the infants themselves!

  • Conspiracy blogs
    Rare but fascinating. These range from the clearly delusional 9/11 "Bush and Cheney did it" buffs (at least, I hope they're delusional), to the Area 51 freaks, to the still popular Kennedy assassination groupies.

    Actually, a couple of the latter seem to point to some fairly plausible theories, including a tantalizing photo of someone who just might be George Herbert Walker Bush skulking around outside the entrance to the Texas School Book Depository the day JFK was shot.

    For further info, Google the name David Sanchez Morales, a CIA employee widely identified as a professional assassin who may or may not have been the actual button man for not only JFK but RFK as well, according to some bloggers and to this BBC report.

    Amazingly, based on statements by FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover and others, there seem to have been links between the elder Bush and Morales during the period in question.

    John Simkin, former history teacher, internet journalist and Blogspot blogger, runs a widely respected history website in the U.K. that includes a section on the history of the JFK/RFK asassinations. He comes to many of the same conclusions as the BBC report.

    Interestingly, many people who think the Warren Commission Report on the assassination of JFK is a crock live in merry old England.
There are a ton of other possible blogger categories. You know who you are.


P. S. One blog I hit once in a while, http://randomblogbutton.blogspot.com/, hijacks your browser and runs all your subsequent activity through a scammer site called bestestblog.com. Join me in complaining to Google about them (copy the URL in red and select SPAM site on the Google form). You can also flag them to Google as objectionable by clicking the FLAG BLOG button at the top of their page, if you're unlucky enough to hit their page.

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