I wish there was a comprehensive listing of Blogs.

It has been a year since I have seen Agnes (pseudonym). In recent years I lost my parents, she lost her husband, and time passed. When I asked her how she is doing, she said “Well, I can still walk.”, so maybe it is understandable that she did not stand up to greet me as she used to, much less hug me hello as she used to. She initiated the topic of politics as she always does, and yelled at length, angry about President Trump’s faults beginning with “He’s getting fat, what a ...” I waited through her usual diatribe until she took a breath, and then diverted her. I talked to her about troublesome events in my life, and she listened carefully and made helpful comments. I reciprocated. When it was time for a stretch, she microwaved the tasty, new product I had bought for us, strawberry flavored cake-in-a-teacup.

But when I showed her my new blog, she steadfastly refused to comment on it beyond saying, “I have never seen a blog before. I don't understand what they're trying to do.” I explained that in my case, I want my life, which is both very typical and yet significantly atypical for a twentieth century woman, to be recorded into history, for my own sake and because women's history has been so seldom recorded in the past. Then I realized that while I have seen quotations from various blogs, I have never actually seen a blog myself. So, where is the blogosphere?

When I got home, I searched online for blogs (short for web page). I found that personal, diary style blogs are hard to find. I searched for a “blog directory”, “list of blogs”, “blogs about ****”, but I could find no comprehensive online listing of blogs, or types of blogs, even though “There Are More Than 440 Million Blogs In The World (and t) he very first blog was created in 1994.”* That is thirty years ago. The first few blogs that I managed to find were rife with cursing, violence, and worse. And those were women’s blogs. What are those ladies thinking? Their page layouts were confusing, hard to read with very fine print, and had entries that were more like notations than literary passages. Most photo illustrations were fairly casual. Other blogs appeared to be poorly maintained advertisements for authors. Wikipedia.com has a list of “notable” blogs, but they appear to be commercial and/or group blogs. A widely touted blog, Boing, Boing, heads its home page with The President of the United States bleeding from his eyes. I stopped there. I feel like our public forum has become a nightmare.

I do not know where the good blogs are. They are out there, on another day I will continue my search. I wish there was a list.

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* “How The Internet Became Home To Hundreds Of Millions Of Blogs In Less Than 25 Years”

http://mediakix.com/2017/09/how-many-blogs-are-there-in-the-world/#gs.IBWRG54

Caption: I Wish There Was A List.

by Annmarie Throckmorton 2018.