Since starting this site in Feburary 2003, I've never thought of myself as a professional blogger.  This site is personal.  I love to write, so this provides a fantastically convenient outlet for me.  I can communicate what's going on in my life to those who care and occasionally write something about which I am impassioned.

I recently began linking to blogs in the side bar.  As I continued to read more and more blogs, I found many of them interesting and worth linking to.

I was recently asked whether the blog links were my attempt to fish for bloggers.  Nothing could be further from the truth.

I'd have to be pretty full of myself to think I rank high enough on the internet to actually compare to most of these blogs.  Many of them are well-established sites with vast readerships — readerships much larger and more diverse than my own.  The majority of them are inordinately superior to my site in that they focus less on the personal and more on the professional, making them great editorial and news sources.  Some of them actually rank well in the overall blogosphere ecosystem, a fact which certainly puts them on a level well above my own.

In my case, I focus more on the personal and make no attempt to be professional.  I'm not here to impress anyone; I'm simply enjoying the mental exercise.

The blogs I link to are those I actually read.  Some I read daily, some I ready weekly, and some I read occasionally or as time permits.  But I do visit all of them consistently.  Whether it's science, politics, personal or other, they represent my varied interests and are written by people whose ramblings I find to be worth reading.

To the mentally challenged idiot who asked about fishing, all I can say is that it's not all about you or trying to improve my visibility on the web.  There are no expectations for trackbacks, linkbacks or any other backs from the bloggers I link to.  There is a hope, however, that some of my readership will take a look at the blogs and, at least hopefully, find something they like and will enjoy reading from time to time.

Ultimately, it's nothing more than a representation of the kind of stuff I read and of my own views (although not wholly represented by any one blog or its content).  I figure that those who read my site may also be interested in the places I go to spy on the minds of others.

I do try to organize them by their general theme, but that can often be more difficult than one would imagine.  Still, I hope by doing so that you, my readership, can more easily determine which of those blogs, if any, that you might be interested in reading.