my guess is that there are least a few different ways to slice up the categories of blogging.  you could do it by fields of interest (e.g. technical, political, humourous, personal, etc.), by style (e.g. narrative, didactic, poetic, etc.) or by effort (e.g. amateur (straight text), experienced (formatted text with embedded youtube videos, mp3 players, etc.), and pseudo-professional (custom CSS stylesheets, custom page templates, custom RSS feeds complete with metatags, photoshop-enhanced photos with thumbnails), etc.).  my preferred method of categorization is by volume.

frequent blogger: a blogger in this category will stumble upon two or three distracting tidbits on the web and properly execute their function of virally disseminating that tidbit to all of their friends by posting a link or embedding a video or citing a snippet of the article.  i like these blogs best because i can peruse all of the updates and find one or two things that are of interest to me each day, in the fewest number of clicks.  my friend dar is fantastic at this, and so is mc hammer, who likes to update his blog from his sidekick from anywhere in the world where he happens to be… 2legit!

standard blogger: this type of blogger usually blogs things that are of interest to the author and typically requires a reasonable 200 – 300 words to say what needs to be said.  these blogs are succinct, to the point, typically informative in a personal or educative manner, and can be easily consumed within a relatively short period of time.  my buddy jim is a great example of this – committing his insightful view of current affairs or personal developments to posterity on the internet where i can read them… or my idol, nariman, whose brilliance is almost beyond compare and within 100 words, can encapsulate and communicate the most esoteric of subject matter in a most incisive way that, while often requiring more intelligence to comprehend than the original source material, brings that matter into a wholly new and meaningful light.

epic blogger:  perhaps the least desired or patronized of bloggers, this type will prattle on and on in an almost impenetrable fashion, rendering his or her contribution to cyberspace virtually worthless by the sheer complexity and intricacy of his or her presentation.  this type of blogger tends to have more thoughts and words with which to express those thoughts than real-life people with whom to share those thoughts in a more suitable fashion, and so, he or she litters the blogosphere with incessant volumes of blathering about matter that no one could possibly find interesting except perhaps for  a clone of him or herself who happened to share every experience with the original copy throughout his or her life (i.e. himself or herself).  i think that this might be the least valuable of contributors to the content in the web 2.0 universe, and is sadly, the category in which i find myself.  but wil wheaton’s here too, so that’s not such bad company.  or is it?

i had a chat with jim via email this week about blogging and why we do it.  we both agree that there are a lot of thoughts that a person might have throughout the course of a day or week or lifetime that might never make suitable dinner conversation, but that needs to be processed, packaged, and put away so that other thoughts can take their place in the forefront of our consciousness.  my hope is that at some point, all of the really big and boring thoughts will be exhausted, and i’ll be able to just write a short 20 – 50 word piece about prince harry and the calgarian bartender.  maybe next week

- g

song of the day for littering the internet with useless crap: don't wanna be like that, joe jackson