Search for interesting blogs yields few results

I recently have begun dedicating a portion of my work day to checking out other people's blogs. This is because until recently I suffered from blogroll envy. You know that sidebar on people's sites where they list the blogs of roughly a quarter of the world's population? Though many people out there have on their sites links to umptine million other bloggers, I only link to a select few. So with the assumption that there must be a slew of enjoyable blogs out there I'm not sharing, and worse yet not reading, I set out on a mission to find them and use them to extend my list of likable blogs.

I started with two local people whose stuff I find funny and witty. Between the two of them they had roughly sixty other blogs listed as affiliates. I clicked them, one by one, to uncover what I expected would be more funny witticisms. Baloney! What I found was a cyber string of blase drivel. Not all drivel was alike of course. Some was political drivel, some sophomoric drivel, and some was just plain vulgar drivel. How sad. What began as a novel way to express one's views via the internet has now become a breeding ground for boring drones, conspiracy theorists, and illiterate nitwits. It reminds me of the cyberfodder people used to send through their email. Remember the Neimann Marcus cookie recipe and all that fill-this-out-and-send-it-to-seventy-friends crap? That's what this is like.

I didn't keep score of the blogs I ran across in my fruitless search, but here's the breakdown. Lots of people write about nothing but their own dull lives. In and of itself, that's not bad. Most all of our lives are dull and reading about someone else's dull life can help satiate some voyeuristic tendencies. But people, when you're writing something you want someone else to read, jazz it up a little. We're not expecting illiteration and double entendres, but why not throw in some sentence variance and maybe the occasional adverb? A guy can only read so many blogs that read IwenttoworkmybossisajerkIneedanewjob before drowning in a puddle of his own drool. I've found more intriguing reading in the Yellow Pages.

Another thing you see a lot of is the political soapbox blog. Much of the stuff found on these blogs is simply rehashed versions of what you hear on talk radio. Each time I stumble across such a site, I have to fight the urge to leave a comment asking if the author has formulated any political opinions of his own. I swear I think most of these people just regurgitatie the same angry poli-rants posted by everyone in their sidebar of supposed noteworthy blogs. The political soapbox blog generally falls into one of two categories, either Bush sucks -- pass it on or Bush rocks -- pass it on. It's like a second-grade game of Telephone.

You know what else you see a lot of in blogdom? Profanity. I'm not offended by it, and sometimes it truly adds to the story. I pride myself on being quite the potty mouth at times, but posting locker room talk just so you can say you put naughty words on the innerwed is just plain stupid. Worse yet is that most of the profane parlance is from people trying to be funny. Vulgarity gets courtesy laughs at best. Most often it just detracts from what you're trying to say. Then again, some use it because they have nothing to say.

My conclusion is that many people are simply whoring out their blogs in the hopes that the affiliated blogger will return the favor resulting in both bloggers getting more hits and thus a slightly more inflated ego. It's like some huge mutual masturbatory cyber aggrandizement. Obviously I'm grateful to anyone who links to my blog, visits my blog, or leaves a comment. After all, I write my blog to advance my plan for world domination share something that people might enjoy reading or possibly rouse a response, but I'm not going to link to someone's blog if I find it overly dull, There are of course some blogs I find worthwhile. My proposed readings are limited to a sibling, a friend, a few locals, a few nonlocals and an admitted schizoid. The one thing these people all have in common is that they write stuff I truly enjoy reading.

If you've got a blog worth reading, I want to know about it.