My dog is awesome. Yours, not so much.

I heard—and these are internet statistics, once removed—that there are nine million weblogs and four thousand new weblogs a day. A friend of mine fears what will happen when everyone has one and there will be no one left to read them.

"Here at MyDogIsAwesome.com, we’re not concerned."

Actually, I’m not concerned, either. I dismiss 8.9999 million of them: the Christmas newsletters gone fulltime, the adolescent cellphone conversations preserved for posterity, the empowered Joseph Dargars, the model airplane enthusiasts, the third-rate Andrew Sullivans.

I don’t dismiss all of them. The better I know you, the more interested I am in your site. My niece Denise—shades of Norman Borden the Mormon Doorman—doesn’t have a weblog, but if she did, I’d read it. When she posts pictures of her family, I always look at them.

Weblogs personalize the web. How many times can I click on espn or the onion? I work hard, but there are those dead spots in the day.

What interests me most, as I try to determine just what makes a weblog good, are the people I’d never heard of before, but whose sites I now visit daily. I’ve mentioned Place and Thyme and Subtext and I will now mention Daily Dose of Imagery. What makes these places I want to return to is something quite old-fashioned: they are flaneurs, the literary term for a walker in the city, and what they create is something like a contemporary feuilleton. And that is why I recommend my wife’s site, cool on the hill. She gets out there, into the world.

More world, less web.

Especially while I spend ten hours a day at my desk making client deadlines and avoiding thinking about defending my thesis. Neurotic evasion is my real reason for starting this. I’m looking for a better reason to continue it.

And, yes, Albert is indeed one charismatic hunk of megafauna.

Comments

[Albert]

Sure, but what does it get me? Frankly, pal, I'm feeling more than a little exploited here. If I'm gonna be your big, hairy muse, I want to be paid. In sirloin, preferably.

[Lana]

I photoblog to escape the pigeons that stalk me on my balcony. Their cooing forces me out and about.