Confessions of a Blogophile.

Hello. My name is SBird, and I hate Bloglines.

There. I said it. I hate Bloglines. In the midst of a booming Blog Culture and many bloggers who have come not just to depend on Bloglines, but to revere the technological wonder that is Bloglines, I imagine I am a voice in the wilderness.

And, yet, here I am. Here I am to say that Bloglines does nothing for me. I have tried it. I continue to try it. And I understand that it improves efficiency…boy, do I understand that. When I post a new entry on my blog, I usually have a comment waiting for me on my email within minutes. Like two. Minutes. These are folks that I must assume have me on their Bloglines and so can see nearly instantaneously when I have a new post up. (Although I do wonder whether there isn’t some sort of bell that they’ve got programmed to go off, since not even if I liked Bloglines would I check it that frequently.) I, on the other hand, often don’t get around to commenting on other people’s blogs for hours or even days after they put up a new post since I still *prefer* to check the blogs that I regularly read the old-fashioned way.

Yes. You heard me. The old-fashioned way. I realize it’s a bit of an oxymoron to talk about such new technology (how long have blogs been around now? five years or so?) as even having an “old-fashioned way,” but that’s what it has begun to feel like. See if this makes sense: I am on my blog’s home page. At home. In the familiar environs of my singing bird motif, of my own words, of my comfy blog list. I can move my cursor rather luxuriously between my post, my comments, and my personally-categorized list of online friends. I can hover over a bloggy pal’s cybername, I can watch my own poised cursor make that friend’s cybername spring to life as it indicates an active link, I can click on it and be instantly transported into another world. Someone else’s world. Someone else’s home. And then–if they have a new post up–I can visit with them there. I love that feeling of almost-surprise, of confirmed satisfaction, when I discover that, yes, indeed, they DO have a new post up, and I get to unwrap it like a present. Really. Sometimes I check blogs like Johnny’s just to get my fix of confirmed satisfaction because, of course, I know he’ll have something waiting for me every single day.

Sometimes when I click over to visit one of my links, they are not at home. There is an old post still up that I have already read and learned from and perhaps commented on (usually commented on). Often, though, I will check the comments on an old post to see what other commenters have added since my last visit or to see whether the blogger themselves has added anything. Those sorts of updates to the original post (the ones done entirely within the comments section) don’t show up on Bloglines at all. So, I guess what I am trying to say is that there is something to the physical motion–the movement between home and off-home visits–the cyclical nature of checking blogs directly from my own–the emotional reaction to the appearance of either a new post or an old post–that is important to me. I even like the random nature of the “hit-or-miss” ethic. Perhaps it’s like the difference between a garment cut and assembled entirely by machine and one constructed by hand. You pay more attention to the warp and the weave of the fabric when you do things by hand.

Again, though, I realize that the analogy to using old-fashioned methods when we’re discussing the blogosphere is an odd one. We are talking about digital technology here, not about writing out our posts in longhand with a quill.

But, finally, it really does come down to aesthetics for me. Bloglines looks funny. It looks like a digital card-catalog with everyone’s posts stacked on top of each other and completely devoid of personality. They all look the same. Now I am very much aware that it’s possible to click on a new post’s title in Bloglines and be transferred over to the original post on the originary blog. But here’s the thing…after using Bloglines awhile, you just stop doing that. It just becomes easier–faster–even more efficient–just to read the posts where they are in front of you. And so eventually you give up and you don’t click over and you read the posts on Bloglines instead, in their completely standardized bleakness. Maybe you click over to comment–but, still, you’ve gone through the process of reading the post in its humorless, emotionless, Bloglines form, and I would wager that that changes how you read the post, what you read within the post. It’s almost as if the post becomes more earnest–and that is not a compliment to the post. Earnest in the sense of taking itself too seriously, too preservedly, which I think can happen even with serious posts that are meant to be taken seriously. If they aren’t surrounded by the homeplace of the blogger that is posting them, they absorb the earnest stolidness of the card-catalog that is Bloglines. The context in which we take in the words affects the words themselves.

I am not a purist. I am trying to do something that’s half-and-half. When I am very busy–too busy–having to moderate a yahoo group gone amuck (ahem), then I use Bloglines just so that my blog peeps don’t think I am ignoring them. They are so good about responding to me, and I believe in reciprocity more than I believe in just about anything. But my preference remains to check my bloglist links one by one from The Singing Bird homepage, as if I am knocking on doors, not entirely sure what I might find there.