I read a lot of blogs. In fact, my drop-down URL menu includes more blogs than other sites, though I've realized that I visit a lot of them out of habit, and not because I actually think that they are stellar (or even very well written). Besides my friends' blogs (all stellar AND well-written), I've come across most of the blogs I read (or have read) by using Google's blog-searching tool while looking for information about something. Sure, I can read the info off the product's website, but why not look for what real people actually think about it? I have found some amazing products, recipes and websites by doing this and it's neat to see what some other people are able to do with their blogs.

Some of my current favorites are www.veganlunchbox.blogspot.com, a blog started by a very cool vegan Mom when she wanted to share the creative lunches she packed for her vegan son for school each day. Though he's homeschooled now (and so not taking lunches, or packing them himself - this is a very food-wise kid), the archives are full of photos of seriously cool lunches that make me want to cut sandwiches into cookie cutter shapes and melon ball the crap out of some fruit. She's amazing. Her new cookbook comes out this fall.

Another favorite is www.krystalatwork.blogspot.com, the blog of a financially savvy 20-something Canadian from my hometown, now working in the city across the water. She's so open and honest about her finances - at any given time you can actually see where she sits financially, if you were really interested in being that nosy - and the way she tracks and thinks about every penny she spends makes me think about my own pennies.

My ridiculously long list of blogs I read regularly (and the ones I would pass through on the way to links they had listed) obviously needed some serious culling, which I did today. Some of them were so boring that I forgot why I ever read them in the first place. Others had terrible punctuation and some had actually disappeared completely. I remember where most of them came from - searching for a review on a cookbook, or info for when I first started running in Ottawa, or some I marked just because their posts were so full of links that I had to mark them so I could go back and check them out.

It's great that so many people blog. I don't care if people think it's nerdy...it's part of the dialogue. While it's true that there is a lot of crap on the web (and I'm sure that there people who would put my own blog in this category), there is a lot of useful information and there are a lot of insightful people out there, blogging their way through life. It's a very, very cool time to be computer literate.