Montana Jones

Blogging about blogging

Or… the fine art of examining ones own navel.

There are several things about the blogosphere that bother me. The lookatmelookatmelookatme phenomena for starters. I am not a big fan of look at me behavior.

I recently read The Tipping Point by Malcom Gladwell. Pretty good book. It talks (partly) about people who are connectors. People who are good at connecting with other people and handle social networks very well. I am not one of these people. I am horrible with social networks. The older I get the more I understand the implications of this on my life. Basically, I will never have the ability to rally groups of others to my ideas. Probably not even if I have good ideas. So it goes. Add one more item to my list of imperfections.

The blogosphere, as we all know by now, is a social network and by having a blog I have decided to participate in that network. Poor me without having any social network skills to speak of. So the questions looming large in my mind are: Why bother? Will anyone read this? Do I have anything worth saying? Should I make an effort toward lookatmelookatme? Will I regret getting attention should it ever come my way?

I recently did some searching and found a healthy number of Montana bloggers out there. In fact I made a point to read a few posts from every single one of them. And I found… no one special. Well, not true, let me rephrase. I found a variety of the same sorts of people I have found reading blogs from around the world for the past several years. Some are politically motivated (and vocal about it), some are family motivated, some are spiritually motivated, fashion motivated, lifestyle motivated, work, play, school, health, friends. All very different from each other, all presenting themselves in a variety of styles that I both like and dislike. They are each trying to say something about the world that occasionally speaks to me, but mostly does not. And the common threads between them all… they each have a blog and they are each Montanans. My people.

I don't care to re-create the list of links I found elsewhere, but I can point to where I started my own search for Montana bloggers, and at the same time make my first small contribution to this social network.

mtpolitics.net

The fine list of Montana bloggers can be found on the sidebar there. And yes, I did visit every single one of them.

Posted by: Montana Jones / 11:46 PM