I got a great comment yesterday, and some neat email ensued. A couple of days ago I wrote a little piece of code that pings weblogs.com. It was for my friends who use homegrown systems. After implementing it they noticed an increase in traffic, as a weblogs.com listing inserts your blog into a lot of other people's software.
As I was thinking about this, it occurred to me that the way blogs grow is interesting. I've been working on mine for a few months now and I've seen more and more traffic. My friends started theirs around the same time or slightly after me and their traffic started to grow. As we get better , we increase each others audience; our links to each other create a small network. We live vicariously through each other, each being a little geeky, sharing strange user agent strings and celebrating as a group when important people show interest in us.
What's interesting is how small groups like ours fit together. Collectively we all read different types of blogs. We form links between different communities, and then we bounce ideas off of each other. The sad thing is that not all of this happens on our blogs, a lot of it happens in instant messenger. It disappears into the ether after that.
I don't know where I'm going with this. Just wanted to throw it up here for future thought provocation.