a study in blogging etiquette, part 1

I've been reading blogs for a while. At first it started out as a purely nerd thing- I'm a big Mac / general technology nerd, and a lot of the news sites I like to read have always delivered their content in blog-like formats. Then I noticed a band that we've played with a handful of times had a link on their homepage to their guitarist's diary. That was pretty neat... Joe's a witty writer and he would more often than not post band-related things, which is always interesting for me to read since I'm in another band that's struggling to break out of obscurity.

I soon found that a few friends of mine had weblogs of their own, too. Cool! Yeah, maybe their content would, for the most part, be only of interest to people who know them, but I don't care. More brain fodder for me to whittle away my work days with.

But as digesting one blog after another became more of a reflex- I could do my daily 'blogging rounds in mere minutes- I needed to think of more time fillers. I noticed a couple of my friends were in a Tufts 'blog ring' on xanga... so I started clicking around. Pretty soon I was reading the thoughts of people I really had no connection to... I knew what they ate for breakfast; I knew who just got a new car or puppy, who was having relationship trouble and even some people who apparently had some great sex the previous night.¹ And I started to think... do these people know that some random dude like me randomly stumbled across their blogs? By maintaining a public blog you are exposing your thoughts to the world... but some people post as if they only expect a close group of friends will read their mental drippings. What if I left a comment? Do you think Omenchild1 would appreciate it if I helped her figure out who to take to a wedding? Or maybe tell Kenneth Hwang of the New Haven Korean Church Youth Group that I have the same guitar amp as him?

I have left comments on Joe's blog before... even though we only implicitly know each other because we've played gigs together (hey, he has the same amp too! omg, 2 kewl!)... I'll sign my posts 'Bennett from Focusin' just so people know who I am, and I really don't get involved when he has a post is obviously only for his close friends. That might be about as random as I'll go, though. My friend / former squash teammate's girlfriend, who I hardly know (I may have met her once in passing at a Taiwanese Dim Sum restaurant), made an awesome comment about Joe Perry's singing vs. his guitar abilities the other day... but I had to bite my... er... keyboard and not reply, because I thought my posting to her blog could freak her out (maybe I could sign it as "#5 Tufts Squash, 1997-2001").

Any me-stalkers out there? Or do I just have too much time on my hands?

1. Okay, only one footnote in this post, I promise... but did anyone else notice that (at least in the Tufts ring) xanga is popular with Koreans who are in church groups? Yeah, I'm a jerk.