I don’t always appreciate Andrew Sullivan’s approach, but I did enjoy his recent article in the Atlantic, “Why I Blog.” The intro blurb (and please, if you know the technical term for the italicized paragraph that appears between the headline and the first paragraph, post it) praises this new and evolving thing, the blog.

As blogging evolves as a literary form, it is generating a new and quintessentially postmodern idiom that’s enabling writers to express themselves in ways that have never been seen or understood before. Its truths are provisional, and its ethos collective and messy. Yet the interaction it enables between writer and reader is unprecedented, visceral, and sometimes brutal.

Here are some additional descriptive phrases about blogging that drop out of the article as I read through it a second time: Spontaneous. Ephemeral. Hypertextual. Conversational. Disturbingly personal, even confessional. Addictive. Compulsively interactive. Revolutionary. Superficial. Postmodern. “A universe of cranks, with vast, pulsating readerships, fighting with one another.”

What a strange assortment of phrases. Sounds more like networked videogaming than an informative conversation between thinking adults. So tell me, vast and pulsating reader, why do you blog, comment, or visit? Where did you link from? Why are you here?