serendipity

My cool new blog-friend Crabletta wrote a great appreciation of the beautiful randomness of blogdom. She obviously has a government transmitter and has been stealing thoughts from my brain. (Oops, did I say that? Let me take the tin foil off and try again.)

Crabby says:

Perhaps the "next blog" button is how Al of Not the Country Club happened upon the Crab. He commented on one of my posts, which led me to his most interesting blog. I now read it regularly. It was there that I commented on one of L-Girl's comments and checked out her blog, about her upcoming move to Canada. She added a link to me, and then cool music guy commented on that.

Don't stop there. Go read the whole post, because she connects these thoughts to a larger issue: building our progressive movement.

I also love the random-chance of the world of blogging. A guy from Ottowa and another from Alberta start leaving comments on my site, the next thing you know, they're discussing and debating on their own blogs, and are probably my most loyal readers. A lovely Brazilian woman writing about her own immigrant experience somehow finds me, and before I know it, I'm a link in the Canadian-Brazilian blogosphere. A progressive Red Sox fan finds Allan, follows him to his new site and now follows all three of our blogs. On and on.

To these ends, on down-time on my day-job - which I have copious amounts of - I will randomly click on "most recently updated" blogs on the Blogger dashboard page. I'll click on any title that looks political, and any quirky title that catches my eye. It's been a very educational and enjoyable time-waster.

The information-sharing is astounding, and for all the cultural hand-wringing about what a dumbed-down, barely-literate society we've become, there are a lot of people expressing a lot of interesting, cogent thoughts.