Pick Me! Pick Me!

There are probably few people who have not, at one time or another, lamented the old adage about not being able to choose your family. Well, as if further evidence is required to prove that blogging is changing life as we know it, I present to you another blog-based revolution. Through this latest development it has become possible for each and every blogger to choose his or her relatives, or at least cut off, bloodlessly, those he or she may wish never to speak of again.

I encountered the possibility of choosing one’s relatives in the blogosphere through Bloglines. This is the moment when I have to admit that I subscribed to my own blog (you can add that to the growing list of my psychological perversities). I subscribed to Galaxy not long after I discovered Bloglines. I was curious to see how many people had voluntarily signed up to read my ‘deliberate outpouring of emptiness’. At that time, there was one subscriber other than myself, and I’ve been completely thrilled every time someone new has come along, even if I don’t know who they are. Anyway, recently, after clicking on my own blog and lamenting, once again, that Bloglines completely subverts all the effort I afford the visual aesthetics of my blog, I clicked on the link ‘Related Feeds’, located just above my blog’s name. There, I discovered a list of blogs, which, according to some Bloglines’ criteria that I have no idea about, are related to my blog.

Now, since I had read all the blogs I subscribe to, and since they weren’t sustaining me through my bouts of procrastination (no criticism intended), I decided to subscribe to all of my blog relatives to see what we had in common, to fathom why Bloglines had declared us related, and, yes, to see if I could co-habit with them.

I had encountered some of my blog relatives before, these were bloggers who commented fairly regularly on a couple of the blogs I already subscribed to. In these cases I can only assume that the relationship is asserted because those bloggers have common subscriptions or there is some consistent degree of separation between us, if you know what I mean.

Since I don’t need two hands to count the number of blood relatives I have that I’m aware of, I’ve found the sheer number of blog relatives somewhat overwhelming. When this many people have something to say, suddenly there are 300 posts to read, and even I don’t procrastinate that much. I’ve had to make a decision to not read archives, or even last week’s posts. For the moment, I will have to get to know said relatives as their updates pop into My Feeds.

We are family (until you disown me)*:

A Cunning Plan; A Fugitive Phenomenon; A Wild Young Under-Whimsy; Ampersand Duck; Azzybee Blog; Barista; Because I Said So; Blogger on the Cast Iron Balcony; Comicstriphero; Dackel Princess; Fluffy as a Cat; For Battle!; Go Away, Please; The Jake Silver Show; Jellyfish Online; Jo(e)’s Page; Pavlov’s Cat; Personal Political; Phantom Scribbler; Scrivenings; Skip to My Loo Loo; Sorrow at Sills Bend; Sterne; The View from Elsewhere; You Cried for Night

When I first attempted to post this, I provided a link to everyone of my blog relatives, but Blogger frustrated my attempts to introduce them to the world by failing to recognise my blog (apparently) when I attempted to publish. I will attempt to provide the links when I'm at the University and the connection is networked rather than dial-up. Meanwhile, if you want to meet my relations, you could just Google and spend hours wondering what I have in common with someone in training in the US Airforce.