i've been making a conscious effort to not add my two cents to the growing mountain of blog commentary on blog commentary on blog journalism on blog commentary. this is partly because i really am not going to add anything more or less insightful than chris locke or meg or jason , but it's also because the whole thing feels like it portends a change that's not healthy.

i like visiting sites that feel personal after days and weeks of reading. i don't enjoy reading post after post after post of navel-gazing that seem like herculean attempts to obfuscate dvorak's "you just don't understand" straw man argument.

so having said that i was trying to stay out of the fray, why did i decide to jump in? because of a coincidence.

just by chance, i had to explain to somebody today what exactly this whole weblog thing was. a co-worker had visited my site and had seen, via my outbound links, that there are a "whole bunch of people doing something similar", which struck him as odd.

"no, actually that's the point," i said in a failed attempt at clarification. "i mean, they aren't exactly the same."

"you know - it's like knowledge sharing and group forming networks and personal branding all rolled into one tidy package." this was getting me nowhere.

so i decided to go with a specific example. "there's this librarian named jenny and she kicks ass. even more than the "rewind librarian" , which is wierd because they are both from chicago. anyway, jenny has a quality weblog and that's what makes it worthwhile. people sharing. with a tool like radio she goes from zero to a worldwide audience in no time flat. it's like this one guy said, strangers and their utterances are the stuff of the web ." as you might guess, i'm only digging the hole of incomprehension deeper and deeper. and that's when i heard the little voice in my head.

"you just don't understand."

"crap." i thought, "i've become blogger moonie."

chagrined , i went back and decided to find a little solice from uncle dave and found two impossibly perfect links. first, i guess i can find some comfort in the fact that no less a luminary than dan bricklin also has attempted to do some explaining of the whole weblog thing to the uninitiated and, not surprisingly, does a much better job than myself. but far, far more perfectly - dave exemplifies the spirit of blogging:

"I gotta say this. Having a librarian in our midst is fantastic. I worshipped librarians as a kid. They are so happy to help, and so damned smart!"

eppure si muove