While bored last night I came up with a somewhat novel idea for a meme - the “Blog Journey”. The idea being to choose a random blog, and follow the path through an entry, to a random comment, to their blog, and so on - recording your first impressions and observations as you go. It serves as a great time filler, and you run across some wonderful blogs while you’re at it.
Following my first “Blog Journey” (see yesterday’s post), I became mindful that you do have to be a little bit careful of what you write - even though you are only passing through, the blogs you see are being written by real people, who probably care what others think. I guess what I’m saying is to give every blog a fair chance - fight the impulse to judge on first glance.
I’ve also started wondering about ways of using technology to play games with a Blog Journey - you could, for instance, have a PHP script that scans a blog for externally pointing URLs, and follows them - looking for other blogs, and keeps doing it - making a map of blogs via their comments.
It then struck me that doing the above is taking all the fun out of it. The fun of a Blog Journey is in the journey. Following the road through the blogs and comments with no particular plan. You really do have no idea what you’re going to see next, and therein lies the fun.
I decided the best method (for me) was to run a text editor alongside the browser, and take my notes as I went - along with the URLs of the various blogs, and then write it up neatly afterwards. It gives you the chance to edit your immediate thoughts too, which is never a bad thing.
Another thing I did was emailed each person I had traversed in my journey, and let them know. A courtesy thing really, but I’ve immediately got some new friends out of it so that can’t be bad, can it. And I of course have some new blogs to follow on a regular basis…
Who needs sites like technorati when you can follow your nose