I knew it would happen sooner, not later: I officially read far too many blogs for my own good.

Of the blogs I have scheduled for daily visits alone, these reside in three distinct organizational nesting groups in my bookmarks, two of them teetering with subgrouped trees that arch back and forth across the screen with appalling ease. It was intended to give some sort of overall organizational sense. Instead it shows how I've become the blogging equivalent of a stereotypical grandma with a foldout recipe index larger than her bread box, filled to overflowing. Who cooks that much? Why, I do! Each day as I'm cruising through those bookmarked blogs, I fear the onset of RSI. I refuse to count how many there are now, since they'll take that as a sign of victory. I have my pride, you know.

So yes, it's true. A majority of my Web surfing is taken up by reading through the blog content of others. Or in other words, it's seriously cutting into my porn time. This incremental creep must stop, so if someone can devise a Web browser with a macro utility that knows when I want to visit a blog, and which one, it would be ever so kind of you, and speed my blog reading greatly. In turn it would no doubt lead to an increased capacity for yet more blogs, but I'm not sure there's a solution to that short of death.

Don't know what I'm going on about? Refuse to see my habit and help me do something about it? That's called enabling, my so-called friend. It could also be nothing more than ignorance, and I can help you past that. Glomming randomly from the Internet (thanks Google!), I've gathered some definitions for the word blog:

"A personal journal that is frequently updated and intended for general public consumption. Blogs generally represent the personality of the author or the Web site and its purpose. Topics sometimes include brief philosophical musings, commentary on Internet and other social issues, and links to other sites the author favors. The essential characteristics of the blog are its journal form, typically a new entry each day, and its informal style. "

"A Web page that has short, frequent updates made to it. Similar to a Web journal or "what's new" page."

"A frequent, chronological publication of personal thoughts and Web links. A blog is often a mixture of what is happening in a person's life and what is happening on the Web, a kind of hybrid diary/guide site, although there are as many unique types of blogs as there are people."

A bland selection, but they'll do for the purposes of this discussion. However, there are several problems I have with them that should be pointed out:

"...links to other sites the author favors"

I assume this then negates blogs which reference sites the authors dislike but wish to comment on/argue over/spew nasty epithets about. Sorry guys, but what you have are not blog after all. So let's call them anti-blogs.

"...has short, frequent updates made to it."

Apparently those which deal in meanderingly long, only rare occasioned updates, are out of the picture. You know, like this one has become. Seems a rather limiting attitude to assume one must have brief but constant compositional skills to signal ones blogging efforts.

"...there are as many unique types of blogs as there are people."

Last I looked we were at six billion served and counting as far as people go on our little planet, and I'm sure this far outnumbers the current blog selection. And besides, in the arena of nature I question the philosophical assumption of just how original each of us really is, so naturally I find it hard to accept that blog category listings hold only one per. But I get the point they're trying to make. I don't agree with it, but I get it.

For me, a bare bones description of what a blog is could be fashioned as such:

"A place on the Web to put ones own cognitively-derived stuff, usually but not necessarily in chronological fashion."

A bit confusing if not sparse, and provides the low-ball assumption that someones blog may be nothing more than a publicly accessible electronic storage bin of their mind's minutiae. And I could pare it down a bit to lose the sense of ownership about the stuff in play, as often a blog turns out to be little more than an ever increasing, commented list of Web site addresses*. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but things are what they are.

Let me assure you, right or wrong or just plain dumb, there's an addiction hiding in all those explanatory paragraphs. And surely the activity of writing about the activity of reading blogs is a sign things aren't going very well along those lines. I don't pretend to understand it. I have no answers or cure. I only know that I've fallen and I can't get up. I'm trapped under a wall of other peoples blogs.

All the while, my porn deliveries continue to pile up at the door...


* Blogmarks?