So there’s this old Pogo comics strip where Ol’ Bun Rab keeps following around the crew with a fire hose. When asked, he says, "I carry the hose," until Albert, exasperated, yells "Whuffo?! What for do you carry the hose?" Then Bun Rab turns the hose on Albert…"that’s whuffo."

Link: This Blog Sits at the: blogging: what it’s for, how it pays.

I have a friend whose mom, an avid gardener, retired to West Africa. If Mom doesn’t like the look of her new garden, she only has to replant, and, hey presto, she has something new and fully formed in a couple of weeks. Things grow so fast, Mom has taken to experimenting. “What would happen if we made everything blue?” Twelve days later, she knows. Blogs are experiments. Each of them says, in effect, what happens to this way of thinking if we apply it to a variety of topics for an extended period? Do the ideas flourish or wither? Do they evolve or merely repeat? Do they scale up in their complexity, or, forgive me, bog down.