The Lost Blogs' Home.

This blogger posts infrequent 'poems' made up out of bits of Spam ... and gets 182 comments?

What is THAT!

What happens when you run out of things to say?

When you no longer have time to post because life gets in the way and there is ironing to be done, lawns to be mown?

Or when you cease to enjoy your blog's colour scheme?

Ask Paris.

Book Kitten is a self-proclaimed library goddess extraordinaire.

She chats and rants about books and libraries, of course, but also posts a bunch of other stuff as it takes her fancy. Book Kitten also has some neat links to the election, vegetarianism and folk music, inter alia. That's eclectic.

This is good - there's plenty of visual interest in a kind of messy thrown-together scrapbook style with lots of photos, bookcovers, 'What Book/Country/Author Are You' quizzes etc. Easy and fun to read - and posts are just the right length. Book Kitten does not suffer from endless paragraph disease.

Oh. Her purple car 'Odysseus' died after just '152,000+' miles. Get a Volvo next time, Book Kitten.

Um, is anyone counting blogs?

I enjoy reviewing them but I wouldn't know where to start finding out how many actually exist.

I suspect there may be around twice the number of weblogs now as there were when the Lost Blogs Home began way back in ... in ... oh, February. Gosh, that was a long time ago!

I'd like to see the J-curve or bell curve or whatever it is mathematicians use to demonstrate phenomena like this.

I guess it goes like this: early days of blogging, gradual but even rise. 2003, massive spike.

Now. Due to the novelty factor of blogs reaching mainstream awareness, we can deduce there will be a greater percentage rate of attrition accompanying that huge spike last year. So, out of all the people who set up weblogs from say, October 2003, many will lose interest fast.

Mathematicians will need to decide on some ground rules. For example, how do you calculate the total number of blogs - do you include or exclude blogs that have been inactive for some time ... six months, twelve months? Blogs that only had one entry? 'Mistake' or 'test' blogs?

I have a need to quantify things like this. Like counting books in a library and how many times they have been borrowed or read.

I don't know. Who knows? I want answers.

While I'm waiting for answers, I visited the following blog.

Just imagine: you leave work, you give all your stuff to your friends, you sell your car, and then out of the atlas, you pick somewhere real nice to go live, where there's like sunshine and banana juice all day, and you like, go live there!

It must be easy to do, because this guy did it.

'A chronological account of the Weiss family'.

Oh my. An eighteen year history of one family. A day to day diary in the present time, plus years gone by summarized with much detail.

The minutiae, the weather, the anecdotes, the cat, the shopping trips, the prices, the children, the computer, the cooking, the sports news, the car repairs ...

Check the archives. Have they transcribed this from written diaries? Why is much of it in capitals? And is blogger secure (if not I hope they have backed it up, you wouldn't like to see it disappear!)

This is amazing.

Fairy Godmother can sense something ... about you. And she is inviting you to test her.

Her soliloquys are half-dreamed, half-imagined observations in a style that has developed a keener edge in a few short months.

Enigmatic, meditative but with bursts of hyper-reality. Is this overanalysing a mere online diary? Perhaps, but sometimes the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.

The Boy Baker rants about traffic, work meetings, Lord of the Rings, council taxes and more. With Franz Ferdinand (the musician, not the assassinated Archduke) lyrics for headlines. Good stuff.

Here's speed blogging.

And you get to play.

Plark's mother put some money into the bank a week after he was born, then promptly forgot all about it.

Twenty-six years later, the bank book is found.

Plark is off to the bank to see how much interest has been accumulating over twenty-six years on ... four pounds.

Elsewhere, Plark talks about frogs, teaching English overseas, robins, his Italian friend who calls blogs 'blobs', missing London and his brother's movie review blog.

Have you ever wondered why you can never get through?

Here's why.

Donkeys, single malt whisky, acting, losing a job, baseball, annoying late night traffic reports and more eclectic monologues from bleak Ken in Jersey City. His next job? President.

It's a common cry around the world when IT jobs are lost to outsourcing. Now there's a blog designed to refute the blame-India hysteria. India, of course, is a powerhouse in IT, providing world-leading products, services and manpower.

Blame India Watch aims to set the record straight about scapegoating India - and Indians - for other countries' economic problems.

About time. I blame Pakistan myself.

Just kidding. Send links to any offending material to Blame India Watch and they will no doubt post it.

Salaam Pax and Raed shot to fame during the Iraq invasion last year. Of course, there have been many others. I particularly enjoyed an earlier Iraq blog focussing on cooking with the great title of Is Something Burning?

Firas has been blogging since late last year, offering insights into the minds of Iraqis post-Saddam.

After the minutiae, the humour, the oddities and the weirdness of much of blogdom, this kind of candid diary about a country that has seen so much tragedy is an eye-opener.

'Political' blogs are a dime a dozen. Of course, many are extremely good. They range from being partisan blowhards to valuable exchanges of information.

Two lefties, a righty and a blog comprises, as its name suggests, three opinionated analysts dissecting the news from their respective viewpoints. Well-argued, in-depth posts.

And then they go at each other in the comments! What fun.

Oh, they are looking for another 'righty' to add balance. Fancy yourself as a right-wing political analyst or commentator?

Blogger Gianna has a new baby. That's good.

She does not get along with the baby's biological father. That's sad.

She blogs all this in her web diary. That's OK. That's life.

But now she says she has to stop because he - the biological father - appears to be like, stalking her through her blog. Now that's really bad.

She says he is threatening legal action for defaming him on her blog.

I don't know all the details, you can read the whole story if you want.

He might at least have said there was a prize to begin with.

It's one of the better dummy spits I've seen. Check it out.

Another great anti-cooking cooking blog.

Does that make sense? Well, it's all about cooking ... but cooking for losers. Which we have all been, at some stage in our lives - like when you move out of home and suddenly discover that even though you have no money, you still need to eat to, like, stay alive.

So. You've got your shake and bake (easiest recipe ever), your tempeh fries and your stew. Your morning after french toast (panic, there's a visitor!) and your weird pizza thing involving a jar of alfredo. Sounds like a 3am recipe I made once.

So no smart-ass french names and no crap. And even though these guys are just having a bit of fun, it's more than just a parody - the recipes are all quite usable and the site makes a refreshing change from the pompous rubbish you read elsewhere about food.

Seriously. Everywhere I look, blogs are suffering. What to post? Am I good enough? (The really crap ones never have a crisis of confidence, they just keep posting crap).

Same with this guy. He should be happy, he posts that he can't write and he gets messages of sympathy.

An Australian online newspaper, The Sammy Sun Online, is in imminent danger of closure.

Earlier, The Sammy Sun reported a serious case of writer's block had affected the online paper, causing a crisis of confidence, desertion by investors and a plummet in its price on the stockmarket.

Intriguingly, despite the writer's block problem which had apparently prevented posts for a week, the editor was unavailable for comment, as were the subjects of most stories.

To avert a disaster, The Sammy Sun Online is conducting an online poll at which readers can vote on the fate of the newspaper.

Simply click through to the poll and vote.

Tonguetied shows how supposedly 'politically correct' language destroys common sense communication.

Political correctness is supposed to help people avoid offending others. That can only be done by common sense and intelligence. You cannot legislate for these qualities. You just can't. No arguments.

The more politically correct legislation, the less people have control over and responsibility for their own actions.

There is a lot of nastiness in the world. I haven't noticed it diminishing in these politically correct times.

A little less judicial interference in people's lives - which is surely only shutting the gate after the horse has bolted - and a little more concentration on core family values of respect for others, taught from the earliest age, would not go astray.

Meanwhile, have a look at some of the absurdities reported at Tonguetied.

Busy blogger, author Isabel Lyman taps into the homeschooling community and links to a bunch of like-minded folks. Blogs will be, without doubt, a vital communication tool for these kinds of communities. Isabel keeps it interesting with short posts and interesting links on a broad range of subjects.

But blogs are free. And a lot of businesses are setting up blogs as adjuncts, noticeboards or online diaries for their business activities. Why not? Advertising costs a bomb.

However, many will get over the blog novelty soon, while some will continue. Re:invention is OK if you're into specialist business services for companies or businesses run by women, offering tastes of strategies, hints on publicising yourself and links to associated news stories.

But is it smart market segmentation or reducing your potential client base by half?