It may be a sad statement about our collective yearning for attention. Or it may be an innovative way to discover kindred spirits out there in the blogging world. I haven’t decided, but I did join Blog Explosion today out of curiosity. The deal is simple: you look at other people’s blogs and they will look at yours. The interface forces you to view a weblog for at least 30 seconds in order to generate traffic to your own site. I tried it very skeptically, expecting to find hordes of bloggers all yelling, “Look at me! Look at me!”, just like all the advertising surrounding us does already. (By the way, if you join via my link back there I get some kickback traffic! Click me, click me!)

I’m surprised at the quality of the blogs I’ve looked at so far. Most of them I spent much more than my mandatory 30 seconds on. Maybe it’s just coincidence, but the sites I was shown were generally better written and had more interesting things to say than many I’ve looked up from the weblog review and blogwise. Some of the blogs were informative, some entertaining, and some just held the facination of peeking into a stranger’s life. A combination of voyeurism and masochism could lead me to obsessively surf strangers blogs, all the while forcing strangers to view drivel on my own blog for 30 seconds apiece!

So, is it a deal with the devil? Are we selling our souls and becoming Pavlovian blog consumers? Or is there actually some potential value here?

Enjoy your 30 seconds!