Sweet Blogger High

Despite the massive, uncharted size of the information superhighway, blogging is starting to feel more and more to me like attending high school in a small town.

Technorati tells us who our most popular bloggers are, but that is mere confirmation of what we already know. We run across the names of and links to these cooler cats on nearly every Blogger nav bar. Go Fug Yourself. Defective Yeti. We even have a prom queen, and she resides at Dooce.com.

Blogger relationships are also similar. When a new kid makes his way onto the scene, you either embrace him by linking and tell your girlfriends about him, or he is at once relegated to the lunchroom table status of fewer than 25 hits a day. When a regular visitor doesn't comment on your site, but leaves a comment on a blog you regularly visit, it is at times a pang akin to running into your best friends at the mall when they both said they'd rather stay home.

Blog relationships don't always survive, either. A solid friendship established in your freshman year of blogging can change almost overnight:

She's funny and all, but she makes fun of fat people when she's out with her other friends.
Please don't push your religion on me. Not even remotely cool.
I got the sense that he wanted to push things too far, so I'm going to back off of that one. Quickly.

By sophomore year, the friendship landscape often looks pretty different than it once did.

The Jake Ryans of the Net generally write about sports and women/cases of beer consumed the night before. There's a good bit of iambic pentameter and haiku in the writings of the AP kids. And the artsy students have beautiful, intricate and incredibly frustrating anime pages.

True to my memory, my stat counter reveals that most foreign exchange students come to class regularly, but rarely speak up.

The loner kids on the verge of a blossoming conduct disorder are also represented in our blogging community: they're called trolls. When they aren't in the basement talking about the latest in pipe bomb technology, they're online sending nasty-grams to a blogger near you.

And finally, there's the One who is unattainable. The blogger you'll crush on because he or she always has a better pop culture reference, more comments or a much sweeter site template. The one who always had the well-placed locker, a date for homecoming and Oxy-clean skin FOR ALL FOUR YEARS. Damn her.

Oh well. I'm late for 2nd period. Maybe later you can sign my yearbook.