Sloggers Raven and Tom were prolific enough to keep me busy, but once I added non-Sloggers Alas , Kos and Atrios to my daily reading I felt I would never be able to keep up. Now I’m up to 36 blogs and 20 e-zines, most of which listed are in my blogroll. I wade through them all almost every evening.

I had some unanswered questions: Why could I find no other Canadian bloggers of note? Were there any eloquent right-wingers (other than Volokh) in the blogosphere? Why was my blogroll predominently male writers when I’d read that the majority of bloggers were female? When I discovered some tools to search for blogs by subject, I decided to dig for some answers. Over the past week I’ve read or at least scanned over 300 blogs. This is what I learned:

1. There are many visually stunning blogs, enough to make my Userland template look unseemingly staid, linear and unimaginative. Take a look at this one for example. Blogs by women, and by younger writers, generally seem to be more artistic in design.
2. Alas, there seems to be something of an inverse correlation between physical attractiveness and quality of content (One very notable exception is Jeff Gates’ Life Outtacontext blog). Many, many pretty blogs contain sentences like: omigod i am sooooo not wanting to be studying for next week’s history test. These blogs generally seem to be written by bloggers with names like [See Note Below]. Capital letters, punctuation and spell-checkers are all used sparingly in this part of the blogosphere.
3. This negative correlation turns out to be something of a blessing in disguise, because much of the more inane content is, I swear, written in four-point type on a textured background. See the link in point 1 above for example. Clearly meant to be undecipherable and unintelligible to anyone over 17.
4. The tone of many blogs is so self-effacing and negative that I am convinced that blogging is now, next to Prozac, the leading therapy for people with moderate to severe depression. Initially I found this darkly amusing, but now I find it very disturbing. There are many people, young and old, quietly and desperately screaming into cyberspace.
5. The vast majority of blogs of all political stripes evidence a complete lack of critical thinking. Most commentary is superficial, unoriginal and uninformed. Two remarkable exceptions are the erudite and prolific Wood’s Lot (at last! a great Canadian blog, and one with a huge hit count per Blogdex, but which strangely appears on few blogrolls, though his blogroll is massive ) and the melancholy but perceptive Texting . Wood has a lovely quote from Heidegger on his who? page and a thread that some of my fellow Sloggers (you know who you are) should read, suggesting that the Web is now infected with thought viruses – memes that could destroy the blogosphere.
6. To the extent my modest grasp of French allows, in my sample of Canadian blogs I read a few that were penned by Quebecois, but discerned no significant cultural differences from English language blogs. There is even a French counterpart to Friday Five called Sept Instants.

In other words, the blogosphere outside our cloistered Salon world is a microcosm of the world it articulates. It is all interesting to those that have the energy and the voyeuristic streak needed to explore it, and who are not too jaundiced by the naivete, frivolity and noise that consumes most of blog space, just as it consumes most of the bandwidth of human discourse. But I’m glad to be home.
AFTERWORD: I had originally listed some blog names where it says “[See Note Below]” above. Turns out these were quite eloquent blogs with whimsical names. I apologize to the owners of these blogs. I should have known you can’t judge a blog by its name.