I want to post an entry every day for three weeks. Why? you ask. (Yes, I have preternatural hearing.) Because a friend once told me that if you do something every day for three weeks it becomes habit and you don’t think about it any more.

This sort of wisdom probably belongs in the same category as something a friend once told me in sixth grade: that you can get yourself to wake up on time without an alarm clock if you bounce your head against the pillow the number of hours as the time you want to wake up — that is, 7 bounces to wake up at 7 o’clock. That sounds ridiculous to me now, but you know what? It has always worked. Belief is a powerful tool.

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A few days ago I posted a little about why I decided to come back to doing Nobody Knows Anything. I thought about (but evidently didn’t say) that one of the attractive features about coming back was there are hundreds and hundreds of writers doing blogs and journals now; I could just do my thing and not worry so much.

Then I was tooling around my list o’ links (available on my front page) and ran across this entry in Brian’s Education Blog. I didn’t even realize right away that the mother of a 3-year-old he was talking about was me.

I don’t know Brian, I’ve never communicated with him, I should be flattered that in a few short days other people have noticed me, right?

I freaked out. I started talking to whomever would sit still long enough (happened to be my friend Rob and my brother-in-law Scott, both of whom were on iChat right then) about it. What did it mean? Why me? What had I done? Had I exposed my daughter to the world in some terrible way? (I’ve already thought about that a lot, believe me.) Why in the world is anyone paying attention to me?

It’s strange how I covet attention—you can’t put a journal on the Web and pretend you don’t know what you’re doing, sorry, no sirree—and then am truly surprised when I discover that yes, indeed, attention is being paid.

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Wanna know something hilarious? I just looked up “nobody knows anything” on Google and discovered that Yours Truly is the number one hit. <bats eyes, looks down demurely, says, “Aw shucks.”> That’s not hilarious, that’s simply as it should be. (Heh.) No, the hilarious part is that it’s not immediately apparent where the phrase “nobody knows anything” comes from.

For those of you pondering this exact question, I wrote a wee something four—oh my God, four—years ago on this very topic. Go read that.

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Something even more hilarious—or completely barmy, you decide: The Lord of the Peeps. (Via Interesting Times.)

I know, I know. Smart, beautiful, hilarious, and author of “Why Web Journals Suck”—and still, I managed to completely overlook blogging until about a month ago.

I’d like to chalk it up to motherhood taking away several dozen IQ points, but the reality is I’d simply come to think of blogging as someone putting up a collection of links every day. While fun, I thought a blog was ultimately just a list of pointers to someone else’s content. Or, as the cliché goes, a blog was just “Intro, link, comment,” over and over.

Turns out I was wrong. There’s a lot more to them than that.

Yes, yes, enough already, okay? I don’t really have an excuse for not having gotten on this bandwagon before. It’s not like I’m not on the Internet 24/7.

My starting point was, of course, when I started checking out Movable Type. I wanted to see what it could do. Journals, yes, and blogs. Lots of blogs. On every topic imaginable

I started by looking for education blogs, because education and schooling is much on my mind these days—I’ve done quite a bit of reading about the subject, but I won’t get into it now, that’s a post for a different day. For some reason, the vast majority of edu-blogs out there are right-wing. Then (wait for it) I discovered the vast majority of everything out there is right wing. (You know, just like real life.) It took me a while—where “while” is defined as “probably five to fifteen minutes of crazed link-following”—to find pointers to leftie/progressive sites, some of which you can find in the right-hand column on the main page. Some of those sites in my blog list are libertarian/right-wing, which will probably surprise anyone who’s talked to me for more than thirty seconds. I read them mostly to see what the right’s spin is on things. After a while I become disgusted and go read “The Boondocks.”

I fully admit to having spent many hours of slavishly following one blogging link to the next and even obsessively clicking on a random-blog link to see where that would take me. One thing I’ve noticed about blogs is that bloggers are much more likely to have a story they’re telling with their blog—an obsession, a hobby-horse, be it political or educational or whatever—and birds of a feather flock together, which is why it’s easier to find groups of blogs than it ever was to find online journals.

(I keep reminding myself, “You have to update ‘Why Web Journals Suck’ to factor in all the revelations you’ve had as a result of blogging mania.” I have zero idea when I’m going to be able to do that. One of the things I know I won’t be updating is “Going and Going”—like that wasn’t immediately apparent from the state that page is in—because it’s just not that hard to find sites with more than a year’s worth of content any more.)

The success of blogs actually made it easier for me to decide to return to Nobody Knows Anything. Two years ago, around the time of Journalcon I, I found myself getting obsessed by the competitive spirit that I sensed going on at that time. I’m not saying it was there. Just that I felt it. How many hits per day so-and-so is getting, what kind of attention this person is getting, who’s mentioning who in “I Love…” lists. Donation buttons started appearing on people’s pages.

The pressure of competition—even if it was just in my own head—was one of the reasons I became less interested in updating around then. (There were others that I won’t get into now. But the horserace of journals was just one factor among many.)

Things have changed. Boy howdy, have things changed. When Andrew Sullivan reportedly pulls down $80,000 in a pledge week drive on his blog, I don’t have to worry about competition. There is no competition. Or, as David Letterman would say, “This is an exhibition, not a competition: please, no wagering.” All pressure is off.

I’m just doing this for the fun of it again. And it is fun, again. Which is why I felt I could start up again.

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One of the things I dislike about the blogoverse (other than the term “blog” and any of its derivatives) is that, much like journalling, there’s an echo chamber. Find a link on one blog, find it on all their buddies. Any dustup leads to a pile-on, and after that it’s like you’re looking at the evening newscasts: you can’t tell one from another.

I promised myself I wasn’t going to get caught up in the “Who said what” mania that seemed to make me crazy as well. But of course, links to what other people said is a big part of blogging.

Another thing I dislike intensely is the number of sites that keep the majority of text on their page in 10-point font. Holy Christ—are everybody’s eyes better than mine or something? I can’t read that, at least not for any sustained length of time. I even ran into one page that had to be in 9-point font, at most. I hit the “random blog” button immediately.