Am I Cool Enough?

The other day I ran into this post on The 5 Levels of Competitiveness in Social Media. I read it with some curiosity and decided I fit into the dabbler category, no big surprise as this is the most common category. Though I do dabble in the part-time user category, ie, I subscribe to a reader (thanks Robin for suggesting the Google Reader, it is awesome!) and I check the blogs I read each day.

My sad confession: I only fall into the part-time user category because I have gotten involved in these people's life stories. Some of the blogs I read are friends in real life. But there is also a growing list of entertaining blogs I just read to feel like I have a connection to the world outside. In my mind I call these people internet friends.

I lurked for a long time before I started a blog myself. Why did I start a blog? Because I wanted to comment on someone else's blog and there was that blank line for a web address and I didn't have one, so after commenting a few times I went to blogspot.com and started my own.

I thought that was enough to make it okay to comment.

Now though, I go to blogs and I consider commenting... but sometimes there are 100's of comments already, and let's face it, I am not going to read all the comments, so to avoid the risk of repeating something, I just keep my comments to myself.

Then there are other times when I want to comment, but I have to ask myself if I know enough about the topic to say anything worthwhile. This happened last week, I spent quite a while rereading a blog post with the American Heritage Dictionary, Merriam Webster Dictionary, and Google Search in different windows looking up words and phrases I didn't understand. I never commented, however, I do believe I stretched my mind a little bit and I was lead to learn a few things I might not have otherwise thought about.

My last thought about all this, is I wonder if when I comment on other people's blogs and I put in my web address, does it give credence to my authority to comment. I know this is the internet and I really don't have to be an authority to comment on things...

And I am probably just being a little bit internet socially weird... but until I am cool enough to comment whenever I want to, with whatever happens to pop into my head, will you still be my internet friends???

Thanks, I need that!