On Blogging

Blogs have become among my favorite ways to spend my time online. The number of blogs has exploded in recent years as more and more people become connected to the internet and advances in society and technology give people new subjects about which they can write on their blogs for everyone to see.

However, one major problem with blogs is that it's hard to determine which blogs are worth reading and which ones are better left alone. I suppose a lot of this depends on what you are looking for as a reader. Are you looking for factual content? Meaningful and insightful perspectives on current events in the news? Personal stories about someone's life? Firebrand commentary?

Because blogs are not really regulated (aside from comment moderation and posting access at times), it can be hard to filter out the good sites from the bad. So that's where technology comes in yet again. Sites like Technorati and Digg allow users to see how popular certain sites are, and allow the best or most provocative sites to "go viral" and become an internet phenomenon.

Technorati scours the internet to find out how many different sites link to one individual blog, thus leading to a calculation of "authority." Sites with higher authority are then seen as a bit more popular, and therefore more credible, than sites with lower authority. My political blog has an authority of 40. That's quite validating because when I first started blogging, nobody knew who I was, nor did anybody know if what I wrote was worth reading. But my number of RSS subscribers, unique site hits, and appearances on other people's blogrolls have steadily climbed, so that means I'm doing something right!

I have more to say about that political blog, but I'll save that for a separate post.