Feeding on Plankton
The always-readable Liz Strauss over at the perpetually helpful Successful and Outstanding Bloggers has asked the blogging world for our metaphors on blogging.

I immediately thought of The Whale Metaphor. (Although the accompanying picture to this post is not a whale but a "basking shark," because I couldn't find a good whale picture to illustrate my point.)

When I first started blogging, I'd read tons of blog entries at a bunch of blogs, each entry just a paragraph or two. And each containing one or two bits of valuable information. I was a whale cruising through the vast Internet ocean, straining seawater for microscopic plankton (thousands of bits of information in my case, and the basis of nutrition in the whale's case.)

I continue to travel through the Internet in the same way - but now I'm one of the plankton in addition to the whale.

Of course, if you take an analogy too far, it falls apart. So I'll leave it at that broad brush stroke, and won't get into comparing the shark's huge open jaws to the huge open mind I find helps me understand what's out there.

So, whenever I explain what blogging is like to someone who is unfamiliar with it, I take them to SeaWorld (figuratively, of course!)

Photo by Chris Gotschalk, obtained at Wikimedia Commons.