I'd run a DEFRAG, but the Blogosphere keeps hanging on the CHKDSK with bad sectors.

I've thought the same thing... I was also excited when I hit 200 hits today but then I remembered there were 1 million blogs, how come I can't get more?

Doc, the fragmentation has always been there. Think of the blogosphere as reflective of offline living. You have cities, towns, villages, shopping centers, strip malls, suburbs, porn shops, Wal-mart, 7-11--there is a wealth of variety online that few in this end of the blogosphere even know about.

When I say "Dave Winer" on my weblog, most of my readers have no idea who he is. When Phil Ringnalda (who?) says "Dave Winer" on his blog, everyone knows who he is. Ditto if I were to substitute, say, Stephen Green on my blog, whom many of my readers know, and on Phil's blog, whose readers would go "who?"

Then there's the entire LiveJournal crowd, of which most of the MT and Blogger types know nothing.

The best way to find new sources? Go to the various weblog tracking sites and click randomly on a recently updated link.

And try not to be so parochial. (Not you personally, that's a general comment.) There is so much more to the blogosphere than the political blogs.

Does anyone remember URoulette? It was a site that sent you to a random URL with every click. It was tremendous fun in the early days of the Web, because the URLs available to it were so wackily random (the Icelandic Fisheries Database was one find — I hadn't seen the eth and the thorn used in actual text before — cool!). But as more and more commercial sites came up it became less and less fun.

It sounds like it's time for something similar for blogs, yes? Spin the wheel, land on a random blog. Surely there's a way to arrange this, at least for Blogspot clients.

But the real question is how many of the blogs are among the few cool, hip, important and influential blogs ... what? You say mine isn't on the list? Never mind.

Michelle,

Blogger has such a tool. Bookmark this URL:

http://www.blogger.com/redirect/next_blog.pyra

As for a random blog in general, go to http://www.website4all.nl/ and just blindly click on the page somewhere. (Select All if you want to see the invisible text.)

It is indeed fragmented. I've been running my blog for almost two years now. In that time, I have had the pleasure of running with different blogging fragments and I think I probably have the most diverse set of readers.

The war/news bloggers may not know who Davezilla is and the gay/lesbian bloggers may not know who Doc Weevil is, just as the design bloggers wouldn't know east/west.nu. Yet each of them is considered "famous" (for lack of a better word) within their own little fragment.

It's a large blogging world out there and I think there has to be a way to link all the fragments together and get people to see how the other bloggers live.

I did notice one discrepancy. LGF is listed twice, apparently reflecting that his page titles are randomly generated. I don't know if I should take the maximum of the two or the addition to determine his true count.

It is right only to add the two counts.
LGF, or any other blog for that matter, is listed twice cause the bloggers link to LGF with two different URLs.

For LGF:
199 bloggers link to
http://www.littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog/weblog.php
188 bloggers link to
http://littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog/

Therefore, LGF's true count is 199+188 i.e. 387

Weblogs.com is a great source for random clicking. I've been spending the last few weeks looking for great writing to link to on my blog, and I've taken to going there at random and clicking.

So far, I've added Standing Room Only (Salon blog), Mint 400, Peeve Farm, Gweilo Diaries, Cronaca, and Capital Influx to my links, plus several left-wing blogs that were part of one site's writing awards (Atrios and Demosthenes).

There are a couple neighborhoods. There's the Instapundit/LGF/Den Beste warblogging commentary sites, plus the Tony Pierce/Moxie/Jim Treacher/A Small Victory/Da Goddess (I just spent time over there trying to figure out why Treacher pulled his site down; it appears everyone knows each other pretty well there).

So there's fragmentation, but if you hang around for awhile and talk to a few people, they all kind of coalesce. As Dr. Spock would say, "fascinating."