Bursting Into Bloggerdom!

Only a matter of weeks after I launched it, this humble little and often aesthetically messy blog is now part of a big-time blog network. Yesterday I received notice from BlogBurst that shoelessjames has been accepted into their realm. What is BlogBurst? Well, it is, to quote them, "a news service bringing quality blogs onto highly-trafficked, high-brand mainstream publisher sites like the Washington Post, San Francisco Chronicle, USA Today and Reuters.com."

(Unfortunately they left out the Chicago Sun-Times, but that's almost understandable considering it's a penny stock company at this point.) 

Is this crazy, or what? I have no idea what their criteria are for judging what a quality blog is, but somehow I must have passed their tests or gotten under their radar somehow and slipped in. It is ironic, I think, that my chosen profession at this point and for the past couple decades, is what many are calling a dying industry, i.e., the printed news, and the news sources (like the Post, Chronicle and Sun-Times) are scurrying about like deckhands on a sinking ship looking for any bit of something that will float to grab on to in the hopes they can stay afloat for a while until they figure out how to survive. So if I can help to bolster one of those floating scraps of the ship, well, so be it. If however, this turns out to be the engine that makes someone, somewhere, read what I've said and offer me a chance to join an even bigger or well-known network to shout my opinions and odd musings, well, that would be even better.

Not that BlogBurst is all that, though. I've noticed that in stories on the sun-times web site, at least, the BlogBurst posts that appear as "related stories" often have nothing to do with the news story they are tagged onto. For instance, it's not uncommon for the Sun Times News Group to do a story about a fatal car crash and the BlogBurst "related stories" referenced will be about a baseball player who has the same surname as the crash victim being sent down to the minors, or if, say, a Toyota Prius was involved in the crash, one of the BlogBurst links will be to a story on an auto site on how to shop for a Hybrid automobile. 

Even more absurd is that 90 percent of the blogs I have bloglisted are better written and researched that this humble blog (I'm just dripping with humility, aren't I?), so this just reinforces the fact that there are no qualifications or prerequisites at all for blogging, and one need not even know what one is talking about to blog, but hopefully I can attain a certain degree of quality of writing and still entertain and amuse (and maybe inform, if I may be so presumptuous) anyone who drops in to read, and maybe, just maybe, I'll attain maybe just a small, teeny tiny, degree of recognition somewhere (hey, it's not like I write for the money!).