Is there anyone out there today that DOESN’T have one?  A “Blog” that is.  Here a blog, there a blog, everywhere a blog-blog.  They can be found on every subject known to man.  What a crazy world we have wrought where the slightest thought is put into words for the entire (internet) world to see.  Originally blogs were more of a personal diary, but now they are big business and used by everyone and anyone who wants to convey a thought.  They’ve been accused of determining political outcomes, inciting hostility, foretelling catastrophes and just plain entertaining the masses.  What did we do without them?  Right.  We read the newspaper and waiting for our monthly magazine subscriptions to arrive.  Occasionally we’d read the “letters to the Editor” which is where most of these thoughts would have been in days gone by.

 

I was never an avid reader, but I was always an avid writer.  In the past, my writing languished in notebooks unseen by eyes other than my own.  Usually because they were jotted down in Gregg shorthand, the language from a dinosaur age that made it easy to pen numerous words at record speeds.  They were private thoughts and feelings, kept private by their encrypted language.  Today everyone’s private diary is public, including my own.  It’s gone as far as parents registering website names as soon as their babies are born.  Try that on for size! Now if Jr. doesn’t have his own domain name registered by the time he’s 3, he may be chastised by his little friends whose parents had the forethought of gaining him a piece of internet real estate from the moment of breath.  But I’m getting too deep into this discussion for a beautiful Sunday morning in early September.  This one would get ugly if we continue.  This wasn’t what I was trying to convey.

 

I’m bringing this up because as I spent this past Thursday and Friday alone in front of my computer and my television searching for any hockey news that I didn’t already know, I noticed how many Hockey blogs there actually ARE out there in the great wide net.  The numbers are staggering; the author names are familiar and unknown.  There are links from one site to another, some giving kudos to their fellow bloggers, others doling out harsh criticism with venomous words safe from an editor’s control.  But while I was reading all this “stuff” that is just a Google click away, I noticed one thing.  With the proliferation of writers comes a reduction of READERS.

 

 

Greg Logan’s blog is the only one that you can see a bizarre number of comments on.  Mostly because it is a decidedly annoying bunch of fools talking to each other thinking they are untraceable.  Go ahead!  Say it!  I know you’re thinking it.  “Of course there are no comments on the Hockey blogs, it’s SUMMER!”  I took that into account and looked at the past IN SEASON entries.  Still, not the numbers you would expect.  Know why?  Those who would normally be commenting are busy commenting in their OWN Blogdom…. Like Me! 

 

Eklund has made a name and a business for himself in the blogging industry.  EK is both maligned and revered and always controversial.  There is no one in the hockey world that doesn’t know his name or had some sort of contact with him.  He’s done numerous radio spots and even has his own internet based radio show that can be podcast.  (Another uniquely new internet phenomenon that it seems everyone and their brother can now have.  How soon will it be before no one will ever talk on the phone?  “Let me just put my family news on my weekly internet radio show and you can podcast it when you have time.”  Thanks Aunt Margaret.)

 

This all leads up to one thing….. THEY CAN’T START THE SEASON SOON ENOUGH.  I caught one of the isles 15 to Remember on MSG on Thursday night while perusing the internet.  It was the 2/19 game vs. the Penguins.  It reminded me how truly amazing Sidney Crosby is as a player and how much I missed hockey.  When Sillinger scored the game wining goal with just seconds left in the third, I screamed just as I did the night he did it.  Thank God I was alone in the den because I felt like an idiot.  Why did I scream?  I knew how it would end.  I was there.  It just shows the piece of the puzzle that’s missing all summer long.

 

Now, if I was like the rest of the desperate housewives in the world, I’d just be searching the net for porn and recipes.  But NOOOOOOOOOOOOOO…. I gotta be different don’t I!  Someday I’ll learn.  Yep… as soon as they can keep the viruses and trackers out of the porn sites, maybe I’ll visit them.  Until then, I’ll set my ‘sites’ on the hockey world where no one cares what my IP address is and there is no shortage of articles to keep my computer fired up!

 

 

PS:  Happy Birthday Jason.  Love "Mom"