Blogging To Go, Please

Sometimes writing an entire post containing both ideas and words feels like too complex a proposition, even for me, who is pretty much never without words. For those of us who eschew paragraphs and desire either immediacy or the visual, there's Tumblr, a site for micro-blogging. Some users include short written posts, but many instead create narratives or evoke emotions by posting photographs or images. Tumbler seems to aim to be a lot like Twitter, where the longer blog post is replaced by a series of updates throughout the day.

I'm not convinced anyone wants to keep up with my daily activities, which involve reading, writing, editing, and making sure the dog pees when he's out in the yard, but fans of social networking all over the world are making a go of this kind of communication. It's sort of like sending an instant message out to the world, and seeing where it sticks.

I recently spent some time exploring Tumblr, and while diary-like sites by 20 year-olds abound, I also found some little blogs that are worth checking out. Somewhere out there exists a man who realized that if Garfield were removed from each day's Garfield comic, we would be left with a daily meditation on alienation and paranoia. The images on Garfield Minus Garfield are indeed scary, haunting, and pretty funny.

I can see becoming addicted to the Cutest Puppy Ever site, a production of the "Cute Puppy Institute." I can see hours of my life wasted trying to figure out how much of this site is irony, how much sincerity. Today I'm going with 90% irony, but that's because I'm in a mood to feel good about humankind.

White people complain about the darndest things, and you can find some of them collected on White Whine. It really does suck when Whole Foods is out of arugula, you know?

One final link for you comes from Blogspot rather than Tumblr, and it's something you may have heard of, but I recommend a visit if you haven't been there before. Post Secret is a project where people anonymously send in a postcard, either storebought or handmade, on which they've written a secret, and each day some of these are posted. This site will tell you more about our collective state of mind than any Gallup Poll, I promise.

It's a damp and rainy day, so go ahead, waste some time in cyberspace.