My Front Yard

As a neophyte blogger, I continue to be amazed at the breadth and depth of this blogging world. For the past couple of months, I have been content to play in "my front yard," so to speak. While I saw there was a street in front of my yard, and presumed that my street probably led to other streets, I didn't leave my yard.

Now, I've been venturing out more, maybe around the block, and I'm feeling stirred and excited by all the blogs I am encountering. Here are a couple:

Betsy Devine: Funny Ha-Ha or Funny Peculiar?

Betsy describes her blog as focusing on "funny stuff [she] can't resist and hope [the reader] can't resist either; struggles with writing a book of nerdy humor; and political good versus evil, with occasional shades of gray."

She describes blogging as taking her back to the days of roaming around her neighborhood, visiting 'elderly' women (as a kid, that was anyone over the age of 30) who offered her orange juice, bathroom privileges and a comfy chair to sit upon while reading kids' books from the 1920s. She describes herself as a "nerd, and even bigger fan of nerds than I am a nerd myself." Betsy uses the expression, "Woo hoo." For that alone, I'm inclined to include her in my "Intriguing Blogs."

Betsy's blog put me onto BloggerCon II, a conference held recently at Harvard just for bloggers on blogging.

Betsy also provided a link to The Iraq War Reader, written by Micah Sifry. Micah wrote a fascinating posting on "Bloggers are editors, not journalists". I'll save exploring that one for another day.

Another blog (by way of The Iraq War Reader?) is Pressthink, written by an NYU faculty member, Jay Rosen. Mr. Rosen describes himself as, "a press critic and writer whose primary focus is the media's role in a democracy."

Pressthink has lots of good stuff for me to dig into. I saw postings on Blogger Con II (more on that later), Karen Ryan (since I didn't know who she was, I obviously had to read that one!) and What's Radical About the Weblog Form in Journalism?

Wow!