Back in the dark ages, a few months ago, I used to look for blogs with the Blogger Next Blog Button. You rarely found anything interesting as it is so random that you had to rely on karma to find a good blog. But it was a fun way to while away the odd hour. Then I found Google Blog Search, Blogcatalog, Entrecard, and DoFollo, all much better at helping me find blogs I might like and want to leave comments on.
Blogcatalog and Entrecard have their own little groups of Power Users who appear to be everywhere on those sites, but are often missing in the Real World of blogging. But they are at least big fish in their own small ponds, which is more than I can say. I am a member of several social networks of one kind or another, but find that I tend not to be very social on them.
So I thought I would give the old Next Blog Button a try again. I hit the button twenty times and found only two blogs that I could read. Not that the rest were so bad I couldn’t stand to look at them, but that they were all in foreign languages. I am not even sure that out the 18 blogs that any two of them shared the same language.
Now I am not against this-I think everyone has the right to talk about Britney Spears and Obama wearing a turban if they want to. And in truth, most of the blogs seem to be good old-fashioned personal blogs with a lot of photos from home, where that may be. Maybe all the ‘serious’ bloggers have taken Bloggernoob’s advice and gotten their own domain names so they can better reap the rewards of dense keywords and well placed ads. Which leaves good old Blogger open to that vast horde of people who think they want to blog, and then give up after three posts.
One of the odd things about the Next Button has always been that it repeats itself pretty quickly. I have never seen my own blog with the next button, or any of the other blogs that read who use Blogger. Maybe it’s all about the new blogs-or the ones no one ever goes to. I used to comment on those blogs that I found interesting, but this seemed to disturb the poor authors of these blogs who were shocked that anyone was reading their blog. A common comment response was-How did you find this blog? Hmm, it’s on the internet. . .
I am reaching a point of info overload-there are still only a handful of blogs worth reading and it is still not easy to find them. So I will just read the good ones that I have found, and hope that the next blog is better than the last.
