By Burt Lum

My head is about ready to explode from the incredible number of blogs that have sprouted across the Internet.

At first, I found it curious how people would post their diaries on the Net. Nevertheless, the popularity of online diaries grew, and they morphed into the Web log or blog phenomenon.

Sites such as Blogger.com made it extremely easy for people to create their own blogs, resulting in thousands of blog sites. Blogstreet.com boasts more than 130,000 member blogs.

If you peruse the field of blogs, you'll find a wide range of content. Some blogs are personal while others are social commentaries.

A blog can be daily scribblings about anything that's on your mind. This gave rise to the idea of a community blog, a fine example of which is Metafilter.com. At last count, its membership totaled 17,149. Metafilter members scan favorite sites and post their findings. The resulting data stream becomes a continuous list of interesting — and often provocative — posts.

A typical day might produce 30 posts. I found amusing entries: a gallery of plastic food and drinks, a site speaking out for women's rights, art space from Australia, an orrery maker, an inflatable church, comments about the Iraqi war, a site dedicated to math ... and the list goes on. Metafilter.com has something for everyone, and can help satisfy that appetite for new and captivating Web sites.

One such site I found intriguing was called Geoblog, at brainoff.com/geoblog. It's a map of the world upon which blog sites are pinpointed. As postings are logged into these sites, windows opens up showing location of the originating post. The perspective is as if you were watching the planet from afar and witnessing the activity of the blogging community. If allowed to run, the posts, each represented by a red dot, would eventually cover the areas with the highest concentration of Web servers.

Experiments like these provide new insight into the nature of the Web. They confirm the proliferation of our global connections. ;-)

Reach Burt Lum at burt@brouhaha.net.