A Happy Convergence: Blogging, Feeds, and Viral Knitting

I love to blog; I like exploring, experiencing, and researching subjects that I find interesting, and then sharing what I learn.


I love to knit. I like the zen of it, the peaceful rhythm and the quiet click of the needles and the way I can think about things as I produce something useful. I have that Yankee need to know that I am not wasting time. Ever.


So sometimes I blog a bit about knitting. The Zees Go West started out as a journal of new western experiences for a Yankee family, and has evolved into a melange of everything that interests me--knitting and traveling and reading and photography and bike riding and camels and tarantulas and more.


My son recently introduced me to Bloglines, a free service started back in 2003 that helps you subscribe to blogs and newsfeeds. Instead of having to go to each of my favorite blogs to check if there is anything new, I can just go my Bloglines Feed page for my personalized list showing what's new.


When I first signed up for my Bloglines account, I started discovering lots and lots of blogs about knitting. There is Wendy Knits, which has over 8000 subscribers; and the wonderfully-named Yarn Harlot, which has almost 11,000 subscribers and is no. 58 on the Bloglines Top 1000 Blogs. There are so many knitting blogs, in fact, that you can search "top knitting blogs" and come up with all kinds of lists, including this one.


With all this sharing of knitting information and discoveries, new knitting ideas become viral, in the sense of a message "intended to be spread," as the Encarta Dictionary defines the word. Every time I read a knitting blog, I get another idea for a project or a technique. What a wonderful time we are living in.

You can subscribe to The Zees Go West by clicking on the Bloglines button on the right side of this page. That would help me know how many people are reading the blog, which would be intensely interesting to me!