I do my homework.

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At least I try to. If I'm going to try and wax profound on a topic such as the ethos of blogging, I figure that I should check out what other people have said about the topic - for at least two reasons. First, I'm honestly interested in the opinions of others - I want to know what they think about the topic. Second, I may discover that others have already given voice to my opinion on the issue, and I may discover that there's no real need for me to write this column. I might find a blog that examines blogs, and come to the conclusion that there's nothing new to add.

And since I do my homework, I was prepared to find a number of references to "ethos of blogging", though I expected to find quite a few more than I did. A Google search brought up only 52 references to that phrase. What I certainly didn't expect to find, upon blindly clicking on the fifth link on the first page of results, was a page from the Boidem. I can't say that I'd forgotten that page, but I hadn't exactly remembered it either. A couple of years ago, when I reestablished a personal presence in cyberspace, I devoted a Boidem column to that event, and among the many other aspects of personal web sites that I examined in that column, I also compared them to blogs. (And of course there was that entire column about blogs more than two years ago.) Interestingly enough, though I devoted only a few lines to blogs in that column, my opinion of them seems to come through quite clearly, and has remained very consistent since that first posting of them.

So does that mean that I've already covered this topic? And if it does, why, only a year and a half later, am I doing it again? Well, first off I've never claimed in these columns that I don't repeat myself. But beyond that, there's more than enough about blogs that merits examination, such that I hardly exhausted the topic that time.

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Go to: The ethos of blog.