A blogging waste of time

I am happy to announce I have today spent approximately 97 minutes of my 8 hour workday reading the blogs of people I do not know.

I recently discovered the "next blog" button at the top of blog pages that will take you to a random blog from the tens of thousands of blogs on blogger.com. Not only have I become very proficient in telling Spanish from Portuguese, I have also learnt some incredible things about the lives and sexual habits of people I have never met, do not know the name of and will never ever come into contact with. After reading about how they have lived their lives for the best part of a year, you start to feel quite involved, but then you press "next blog" again and they are lost forever in cyber space, leaving you feeling slightly bewildered and betrayed.

I have a friend who also dabbles in the readings of strangers` blogs. Once one blog that they read regularly was mentioned by a different site, and after their initial thought of "ooh, that`s my friend. I know him, how strange she knows him too'", it took a worrying amount of time to realise that it was in fact not their friend at all, but just just a comment about a person who`s site they read. I have also had similar reactions, for example when Go Fug Yourself won a bloggie, I was pleased for them in a way that should be generally be reserved for close friends and relatives. Surely developing such emotions about a totally unreciprocated relationship is a very worrying factor of the blogging phenomenon.

Although I do suggest having a look at my new friend`s this blog that I was reading this morning.