Me Blog Pretty One Day

I have a confession to make. Until I started this blog, I was—and still am—embarrassingly new to the blogosphere. I am but a young Padwan, and I have much to learn.

Launching a blog without any knowledge of the "masters" now seems akin to composing your first opera before you've heard of Verdi.

Though I had come across a few blogs previously, I now must come clean. My first time reading the Daily Kos was yesterday. Kos, I learned, gets 20 million visits a month, in the top five according to Kos himself. He is a guy, right?

A little piece of advice from His Blogness revealed that I've already started wrong, all wrong. "Get away from Blogspot," he says. But I just got on it! I take it that having a blog on Blogspot is akin to sporting an AOL email address. You just won't be taken seriously. Or maybe it’s a case of blogsnobbery.

I also read somewhere that the average blogger spends more than three hours a day working on blog stuff while at work. Well, now that's starting to sound like a problem, a nasty habit. If that happens to me I hope my friends and family stage an intervention.

A couple of days ago, my dear friend, Amy, may not have realized that she had just clued me in to the concept of blogrolls. I played it off like Michael Keaton in Mr. Mom when he claims he's going to re-wire the house and Martin Mull says, "Oh, so are you doing it all in 220?"

"Yeah, 220, 221, whatever it takes."

I think I'll probably have a little party the first time someone links to me. It'll be like having a secret admirer. A little ego trip.

But I hope it's not about egos. Kos and the cabal of progressive bloggers I'm just beginning to discover are changing the political landscape. Congress is debating whether blogs should be subject to campaign finance restrictions. Candidates for office are placing paid ads on popular blog sites. This is a big deal, but you knew that.

Bear with me as I learn and experiment and discover where this little blog wants to go. I’m reminded of Amy’s first garden, the subject of her delightful first book, From the Ground Up. She was a mere novice when she first sunk a spade into the rich soil in the backyard of her Santa Cruz bungalow. As she learned from trial and error and sage advice from experienced gardeners, numerous planting beds were moved, replanted, and ripped out. Many plants struggled. Many experiments failed. Others flourished. I’m sure she now laughs at some of the rookie mistakes she made early on. The important thing is she started. Her garden is now a masterpiece—and so is her blog.

Even if it is on Blogspot.