Rambling / thinking aloud:

There's used to be one or two dozen weblogs, and it stayed that way for quite a long time. Now it seems there's a new one popping up each day! Thankfully, most of the new weblogs I've been to are worth visiting. If you're one of the new webloggers, and I haven't linked to you, it's not because I didn't like your site - there just isn't enough time to visit or read them all.

I don't want an aggregation service any more than I want bits and pieces of my friends to be delivered to me on demand. I want whole friends, and whole sites. Imagine if TV shows were just a collection of punch-lines and love scenes, with none of the storylines or courting inbetween! Spew...

My point? Weblogs are growing like everything else on the Internet - so vast that it's basically impossible to consume it all.

Another thing I've noticed is that most weblogs, including this one, link to a lot of other weblogs on a daily basis (mostly the new ones). To the outsider trying to assimilate this style of web site, it might seem a self-obsessed behaviour. But somehow, I can't agree with that, even though I can see how it could look that way. The difference between weblogs and news sites is that in theory, weblogs are not in competition with each other. The fact that very few weblogs have advertising certainly helps in this regard.

This reminds me very much of the way free BBS's were viewed compared to pay-BBS's.

Anyway, as you can see, I'm trying to get a handle on this, and I'm not there yet.

You can help me greatly by providing some feedback!

If you read this page on some sort of regular basis, daily or not, please e-mail me. Things I'm curious about:

• Do you read other weblogs?
• What do you prefer, good links or a personal perspective on things?
• Did you ever visit BBS's back before the internet became mainstream?
• If so, did you only visit one BBS, or did you visit a "circuit" of BBS's?
• Do you miss old-style BBS's?

I'm trying to figure out where the similarities between weblogs and BBS's start and finish. The message doesn't have to be long... even one or two word point form would be appreciated... Thanks!