The expanding blogosphere

While I have been known to think about writing a blog post while doing something else, and I can relate to this cartoon, I'm not at all sure why I blog. To chronicle my life? Maybe.

I have been mulling my reason for blogging ever since Nancy at Life in the Second Half wrote a post about the whole business of followers and the widget in Blogger that allows you to parade your followers on your blog. I did a little research.

The expansion of blogging in the past few years is phenomenal. I myself follow 47 blogs, using Google Reader or the Dashboard to show me when someone has posted something new. I try to acknowledge anybody who leaves a comment on my blog, whether a follower or not. And some comments I even delete, because they are either trolling or sending people to some place with an agenda I don't share. This requires some diligence in staying in touch with my own personal blogosphere. I write a personal blog (from Wikipedia):

The personal blog, an ongoing diary or commentary by an individual, is the traditional, most common blog. Personal bloggers usually take pride in their blog posts, even if their blog is never read. Blogs often become more than a way to just communicate; they become a way to reflect on life. Blogging can have a sentimental quality. Few personal blogs rise to fame and the mainstream, but some personal blogs quickly garner an extensive following.

Almost all of the people I follow or who follow me use Blogger.com or Wordpress.com to create their blogs and most allow comments. I chose to use Blogger because I don't need to use any cool stuff in my posts. I did find out, in my research, that Blogger has the following limitations (none of which I was aware of):

• Number of blogs = Unlimited
• Size of pages = Individual pages (the main page of a blog or archive pages) are limited to 1 MB
• Number of posts = The blogger editor can only access the most recent 5,000 posts
• Number of labels = 2,000 unique labels per blog, 20 unique labels per post
• Number of pictures (hyperlinked from user's Picasa Web Album) = Up to 1 GB of total storage
• Size of pictures = If posted via Blogger Mobile, limit 250 KB per picture; posted pictures are scaled to 800px

Did you know about these limitations? I realize I'd better go in there and clean out my Picasa album, since that's the only limitation I'm likely to come up against. I'm not likely to write 5,000 posts! And there are search engines out there that spend their time seeing what trends are developing in the blogosphere, such as Technorati. Technorati, which is among the most popular, provides current information on both popular searches and tags used to categorize blog postings. It's also a cool place to visit. They index around 113 million blogs!! I still don't know why I write, but now I'm REALLY self conscious about my posts...
:-)