Bloglines to the Rescue!

Well, I finally set myself up a Bloglines account and put everyone's blog into it. Now I can keep track of everyone's posts and maybe be a better commenter and, therefore, a better all-around member of the ENG506 blogging community. I already posted a couple comments on some blogs: giving someone some wiki help here, ranting about homeschooling there, and so on. I feel like a better person.

Sure, I had a Bloglines account for ENG307 (the undergraduate version of this course) last year, but I abandoned it early. Why? I don't know. I decided I'd rather just follow the blogs of the one or two friends I had in the class, and to heck with everyone else. But that's just not being socially responsible.

Anyway, I was disappointed to see that most people in the class only had one subscriber (before me) to their blogs. This tells me others are not using Bloglines. Get with the program, people! If you want to be an upstanding Blogospherean (Blogospherite?), you need to be tracking the blogs of others! Why would people care about your blog when you don't care about theirs? That's just selfish, folks. Selfish.

This also goes hand-in-hand with linking to other blogs within your posts. People have been fascinated that I've had both Will Richardson and Tim Wilson comment on my blog already, but it's very simple. You link to others, they see you've linked to them, they check out your blog. It's my new favorite word, cropping up again: connectivity!

So anyway, Blogospherers (Blogospheria?), keep in touch with your fellow bloggers. Let them know you're out there. Because, without social interaction, it's just typing into thin air.