Saturday morning. These allergies or virus, or whatever it is that has had me wheezing and coughing and not sleeping for a week has waned slightly and I slept well last night. I’m still at a very low energy level, so I thought I would do a little low impact surfing.

By low impact surfing, I mean visiting blogs by following links from sites like EntreCard or MyBlogLog. What I like about these sites is that you can let people know that you were there without having to actually think up some sort of comment to leave. With Entrecard, you can drop a card which the site own sees, and hopefully decides to come and visit your site. You can also buy advertisements, and I’ve been running Entrecard advertisement right below my list of MyBlogLog readers.

MyBlogLog shows a list of recent readers on your site, and I like to check out the blogs of people who have visited via MyBlogLog, as well as people who have been reading their sites.

Typically, these sort of visits bring me to sites very different than I would stop at as a progressive political blogger. Most of the time, I like that. However, sometimes it can be a bit tedious. EntreCard listed a whole bunch of people that had dropped cards on me, but said I hadn’t dropped cards on them. I went to visit a few and found that we’re all ones that EntreCard said I had visited, so I couldn’t drop a card on them. More annoying, as I tried following some of the ads most of them were for opportunities to make money fast on the Internet.

So, I switched over to checking my visitors via MyBlogLog. First on the list was Jill Miller Zimon. Jill is a great writer. We’ve crossed paths talking about different issues and conferences, but I don’t believe we’ve ever met face to face, even though I now live in the town where her parents live. One of these days we will meet.

Unfortunately, her blog doesn’t fit nicely into my idea of Saturday Morning Surfing. While the make money fast blogs were too mindless, Jill’s writing is always thoughtful and requires more time than I wanted to commit to any blog entry. I read her post about Bush, Marc Dann, and Women’s Voices Women’s Votes. Go check it out.

Jill’s list of recent readers included Susan Mernit. Susan is another great writer that I typically wouldn’t visit for some light Saturday morning reading. In her recent blog posts she talks about why she is reading more Twitter and Friend Feed. They act as effective filters for those of us already on information overload. I have problems keeping up with the flood of emails and haven’t gotten through all of the blogs in my feed reader in ages, but Twitter provides a good quick glimpse into what is going on.

She also talks about Digerati as media brand. Well worth the read. It seems like digital natives get both of these ideas. Teenagers spend much of their online communication in short blasts, and do a good job of defining their personal brands online, although some adults might question the markers used to denote a teenagers brand online.

With all this in mind, I went over to Twitter. It struck me, that here I was seeing a much better snapshot of our twenty first century world. whatsnext just finished reading Empress Orchard. chrisbrogan is saying hello to PodCamp in San Antonio. He, along with jerikpotter are twittering about SOBCon. ZoeConnolly is checking the air field in Caledon Penzance in Second Life. Earlier, several friends from Second Life were complaining about difficulties logging in. Others had been twittering about problems with YouTube earlier.

nprpolitics is talking about polls, Rev. Wright, and John McCain. JasonBarnett is reporting live from the Minnesota DFL Second CD convention and MikePanetta is at the DC Democratic State Committee Convention. kentbye saw a bunch of old friends at the Maryland Film Festival. Many friends are talking about Maker Faire.

acarvin is just 49 people away from having 2000 followers. PurpleCar and jeffpulver are talking about Iron Man. Apparently, it is getting great reviews on Twitter and they are both looking forward to seeing it. http://twitter.com/jcnork>jcnork is preparing for his son’s first communion.

As I scan through all of this, my mind goes to Mrs. Dalloway as she reflects on London on the fine day of her party. Pink Floyd’s lyrics come to mind, “Snapshot in the Family Album”. rickmahn twitters from SOBCon08, that Brian Clark says “It is marketing suicide to be too general in blogging today”. I don’t know. Maybe for the make money fast blogs, that I decided to skip over earlier today, it is marketing suicide to be too general. Yet as Susan Mernit points out, people like Scoble, Calcanis, Arrington and Winer have done a good job of creating compelling brands. I’d much rather read PurpleCar and jeffpulver talk about what movie they want to see today, and jcnork talking about his son’s first communion than I would listen to people who have lost authenticity in their business blogging as they try to focus on a narrow niche.

So, I’ll return to my random surfing, until Kim and Fiona get home from riding, and then maybe we’ll find something fun to do on this overcast weekend as well.