At 3:46 AM on July 17, I gave birth to the Cubicle Dweller weblog in a messy splash of HTML. That was only a few weeks ago, which pretty much makes me a blog-newbie, so bear with me if I’m still trying to get a grip on this blogging phenomenon.
It seems like every day a million new weblogs find their way into existence. According to Blogger, during the month of July, new Blogger weblogs were created at an average rate of 1.5 per minute. That’s a mind bloggling rate!
All these millions of weblogs now compete for attention. It’s as if, at first, there was a room full people, and a handful were taking turns on stage, saying interesting and occasionally insightful things. But then someone in the back started talking too. Then others started, until a murmer from the back became a general “rhubarb rhubarb rhubarb”, which then became a hubub, which then completely drowned out the people on the stage.
Now we’re in a stadium full of people, shouting at the top of our lungs, and Blogger is handing out free megaphones.
The chances of a new blogger actually being heard are now pretty slim, it seems. Have a look at Weblogs.com, for example. On their home page, they list only some of the weblogs updated within the last three hours. Among the hundreds on this list are some excellent weblogs — well-written, thoughtful, witty, and entertaining. But many more are about more mundane subjects — about what their dog did, or what they had for breakfast (um…oops).
Way back when the World Wide Web was new (oh… long about ’94… or was it ’95?) and I was putting my first web pages online, I wasn’t quite sure why I was doing what I was doing, and less certain why anyone would visit my site. I still don’t know why. But I do know that shouting in a stadium and being heard by only a few passers-by is far better than not being heard at all.
Monty Python meets Lego in 
Have you seen this show? If you’re not expecting it, 
So I carried that evil little bag to the office with the grease creeping across the surface of the brown paper like a spreading stain of guilt upon my soul. In the bag was everything one shouldn’t have for breakfast — salt, grease, heavily processed animal product, cheese-like oil product, and other unidentified ingredients. It was also evidence of my support of one of the biggest multinational monstrosities in existence. It was a surrender to the dark temptations of Ronald, head chef of Satan’s corporate kitchen. (As I’ve mentioned before, the position of Satan’s sous-chef is occupied by BK.)