[home slide shows] and swedish wife swapping

What makes some of our fellow bloggers tick? I liken it to the old days of the home slide shows.

What I mean is those days when you and your missus had made some fabulous slides of your holidays and the guests were invited over one evening, given a cuppa and two biscuits and made to watch the first of five boxes of the bloody things, projected onto the far wall, complete with deadpan commentary.

‘And this one’s Nora on the steps of the guesthouse, this one’s Nora walking down the street, this one – it’s a bit out of focus, sorry – is Nora getting onto the boat, this one’s Nora leaning over the rail just before I played a trick on her. Laugh!’

‘What’s this one?’ ventures a guest.

‘That’s Nora, after she belted me one. This one’s young Tel with a silly expression on his face. You gotta love him, don’t you?’

The guests had other plans in mind for young Tel and now had to counter your assault on their senses and invite you both round for their seven boxes of slides from their last trip to the Costa del Sol.

The prevailing mood on those evenings was that there had to be an interesting slide coming up sooner or later.

‘This one’s Maud on the sand, this one’s Maud on the sand but from a different angle and this one’s from Swedish wife-swap – oh no, how did that get in there?’

The only interesting part of the evening was quickly removed from the tray [or carousel, if you were posh].

Other bloggers are more blog-community minded. Whenever they can, they get round their roll of seventeen blogs and admire the Flickr photos which are actually beautiful and do make you long to be there.

Sometimes I wonder about interpersonal blog relations. By definition, you are being pro-active having a blog in the first place. Therefore you’re setting out your stall and hoping you’ll be visited, even better is that you’ll be commented on and the summum bonum – that you’ll be commented on intelligently.

Against this are two things. Firstly, time. There’s very little of this commodity, with RL impinging. Secondly, we have our blogs we go to and there are those we don’t go to.

One fellow blogger has a certain style of blog he reads. Occasionally I email him and suggest I found this blog which was right up his alley. Recently I recommended Northnorthwester to him. Days later, asking if he’d seen this post or that, it was clear he hadn’t and the reason was that NNWer wasn’t on his daily roll. The reason for that was that he hadn’t discovered NNWer for himself. I’d been the one who’d asked him to look.

He’s read Sonus though, apparently and that’s to his credit. Sonus reminds me of DK who has an established reputation and a huge following. You’d have to put Eugenides in there too.

One of the most inventive blogs I’ve yet seen is Lord T’s and yet I seem to be one of two commenting. Now why? Are people reading him and just not commenting or are his articles too long and too taxing for the brain? Or do people not like his style?

Two blogs I really like but admittedly, not always accessible in what they’re saying, are Pisces and Lord Somber. What about L’Ombre too? That man is right on the ball.

The Nourishing Obscurity award this month for Most Improved Blog is split between Ma Cherie, Uber of the Fabulous Avatar [although I fear she's having a go at me] and Angus. Those girls are really rocking at the moment and Angus is on song.