OmegaMom has arrived as a bloggeur. Yes, she got her first negative comment: "This blog SUCKS!" The wit. The clarity. The call for more in-depth discussion of ideas. Such a well thought-out comment requires an equally well thought-out response, which OmegaMom will crib from Johnny: "Well, well, you're....you're....a POOPY FACE!" So there. But it brings us to the topic at hand: blogging, commentary, and linking etiquette. (If OmegaMom misspells things today, please forgive, she's on day 3 of a Bug which has her running a fever and living on NyQuil.) Kent Newsome recently wrote an entry on the question of being "Old School" (blogs as a "venting into the wind" exercise, sans comments) versus the "New School" (where blogs are seen as a conversation with your readers). Seems that a Big Name Blogger got disgusted with negative commentary on his blog and shut the comments down. Very Mom recently got a whole spate of negative commentary, and writes about how it can make the blogger feel. She shut down commentary for a while, also. And BH happened to chime in on the subject of reading blogs, leaving comments, and "being respectful". All of these happened around the same time. It makes OmegaMom wonder if there's some type of Jungian undermind that the blogoverse is tapped into, so that a topic sort of floats to the surface in multiple people's minds at once, seemingly on its own, but actually tied in, spiderweb-like, to multiple other consciousnesses (?) at once. At the same time, there's the question of linking. OmegaMom thought that the idea of blogs was to collect links that interest you, present them to the world at large, and say, "Hey! Here's something that interests me! It might interest you, too!" So OmegaMom stumbles upon an interesting blog, or a quirky blog, or an article that piques her interest, and dumps it into her blogroll forthwith, neither asking permission nor expecting a reciprocating link. The Big Bloggers, it seems, do expect a reciprocating link. Hmmm. (Please, please, don't link to me, Mr. Newsome! I don't want thousands of hits per day! It's scary and I don't know how you do it!) Some board buddies of OmegaMom's are very cautious, and ask to link to others' blogs. Then there are those who want to be totally anonymous on the blogging sea, and don't want to be linked to. Does OmegaMom have a point to this post? Not really. A foggy brain and shaky fingers add up to blogging bloviation. Feel free to add another "This blog SUCKS!" comment; OmegaMom will merely nod her head in sad agreement today. Anyway, I just found the whole thing interesting, and, as is my wont, I toss it out there into the blogoverse for folks to read and think about.