9. The Blogs Must Be Crazy

8. Go, Blog. Go!

7. My Life as a Blog

6. The Blog Whisperer

5. The Complete Book of Blog Breeding

4. Blogging for Apples

3. It’s a Blog, Blog, Blog, Blog World

2. The Curious Incident of the Blog in the Night-Time

1. Who Let the Blogs Out

Biz Stone is a great blogger and a self-proclaimed genius but Who Let The Blogs Out? Biz, you can do better than that man! [UPDATE! I've been Stoned]

Today as I was scraping the old paint off of the ceiling for the slow-as-glacier bathroom reno project, I thought about all the goofy little things cluttering sidebars in blogs. There are geo-locators and blog rolls, 15 different RSS syndications, favorite links, topics, different coloured buttons that give cudos to various people and projects, weather reports, phases of the moon, photo-rolls, skype numbers, calendars, tickers, chat boxes, and that’s just scratching the surface.

As I peeled away the layer upon layer upon layer of toxic lead-and-oil-based 100-year-old paint, I realized that modern blogs aren’t that much different from their predecessors: the 1st and 2nd generation web pages that sprang up in the mid 90s.

Flaming logos, BLINK TAGS!, total abuse of colour schemes and animated gifs, hideous roll-overs, horizontal rules, tables upon tables upon tables, scrolling java-script text, basically anything anyone could get their hands on was thrown into the pile. It was an exciting time and great cause for experimentation.

But eventually you have to strip away all the bling and ask yourself: what am I trying to communicate here? Does all this extraneous crap contribute or detract from what I’m attempting to say? If David Weinberger is right and the internet is a conversation, than let’s tone down the background noise a little.

That being said, I’m still going to have an ugly experimental blog to play with every single blog-toy I find. Who says I can’t be contradictory and hypocritical? I’m a moody blogger, damnit! I do what I want.

Woof. Woof woof woof!