blogging the bloggers

I read too, too many newsletters and publications. Seriously:
Publisher's Weekly (weekly, duh)
Shelf Awareness (daily)
Circuits (David Pogue, tech editor of NYT, weekly blog)
In Advertising (Stuart Elliott, advertising industry editor NYT, weekly blog)
Bookmarks (bi-monthly)
Library Journal (monthly)
Library Hotline (weekly)
Reader's Advisory News (no idea about frequency; it appears when it appears)
BookReporter (this is a new one, I don't know how I feel about it yet)
eSkeptic (again, it comes around when it comes around)
Bookstores (Barnes and Noble, Borders, Powell's, Whale of a Tale)

Not to mention the listservs:
YALSA_bk (teen reading)
middle_school_lit (middle school reading)
SJSU (geez, there are, like, three from the school: admin, alumni, quickslis)
CALIX (CA libraries)
SLIS Yahoo group
Fiction_L (reader's advisory)

There's a reason I don't read much in the way of newspapers (except for Sundays; gotta gets me a crosswurd fix!). Every so often I check in with the cnn.com homepage to make sure that the world is still on the slippy-slide to hell, then go back to what I was reading. Much better that way, n'est pas?

So this is why a lot of what I write seems to come from other sources. I'm one of those people who never really has an original idea, but I dis/like other people's original ideas and want to riff on them. Yep, I'm a reader, through and through. That's not such a problem is it?

Of course, what this means, is that I might be stuck in a tailspin heading straight for a post-modern vortex. The problem being that I'm riffing on bloggers, who are people riffing on other people's ideas. This is like a po-mo version of telephone. Me being as anal-retentive as I am, I try really hard to dispel any myths or misinformation, add corrections and all that, and try to disperse only whole and true information, tracking the sources back to primary, and keeping the almighty urban legend at bay. After all, I have a responsibility to my readers (all zero of you).

Just thought I'd put this out there. And now we return you to your regularly scheduled nonsense.