Who and why I follow

I don't follow many celebrity blogs or Twitter feeds because most celebs just aren't that interesting or witty. But the handful I follow, do have a common thread: they are all patently down-to-earth. It made me think of one side benefit from social networking, especially Twitter. As with any "offline" conversations, after a while, you get a sense of what people are like. When somebody is posting updates regularly, it becomes easy to detect patterns (even if those patterns may be generated by the PR manager).

So who do I follow?
* Neil Gaiman [Twitter] [blog]
* Jason Mraz [blog]
* Rob Thomas [Twitter]
* Pink [Twitter]

Three musicians and one writer. The writer lives in a Addams family house on a few Minnesota acres, devoted to his family, his girl and his dog. One singer lives on a 21st century commune, planting vegetables and feeding friends. The other singer raves about Puerto Rican fare at the in-laws and campaigns for unwanted dogs. The third singer is just plain Alecia offstage, cooking massive Thanksgiving dinners for her crew and missing her beau everytime she tours overseas.

As far as "interesting" goes, I guess they don't tend to tweet or blog stop-press stuff. Nothing of what they say gets flung about on Facebook, or re-tweeted, or quoted on Digg and Reddit. Some lazy hack on an online news website won't build a 300-word report on their feeds.

But what makes them eminently interesting to me is their ordinariness, the basic humanity that shows through in their rants and musings. Or maybe I just haven't outgrown fan-dom. In any case, it's always cool to find that we're all the same in the ways that matter.