Is anyone reading me?

Some time ago I started a blog. Another one, in fact, since this is the sort of thing I do at random intervals in the vain hope that someone out there might read them.

Since I started this particular blog I haven't had any what you might call 'real' comments from readers, but I have had some odd ones.

Some lead to what appear to be advertising sites. For instance one comment starts off with a note - quite unrelated to what I'd been writing - about the hurricane Katrina, and then, without pause for breath, goes on about Health recipes, and has a link to a site that's selling, so it seems, health recipes.

However, the next comment is actually related to my post – a post about looters in New Orleans. And it does lead to a real blog. So there is one other blogger out there who reads other blogs.

On the other hand, a quote from Dorothy L Sayers gets a comment from someone apparently promoting Xenical, as well as one from someone promoting Direct Satellite TV. Sayers would find it all rather ironical, I think.

She seems to attract these advertising gooks: the next quote from one of her books that I included in the blog has someone wanting me to comment on their dog house training tips, and someone else talking about electric scooters and downloading music, all pretty much in one breath.

There is one comment from someone who writes from a genuine blog, by the look of it, but rather strangely it's attached to a silly piece I wrote about trousers and underpants, and the comment is from someone who's a female Sikh. How did that happen?

What brings these people to my site? Do the advertising ones just troll blogs, leaving their slimy trail behind wherever they go?

The genuine bloggers, however, are a bit of a mystery to me. Do they want to start a conversation with me? It doesn't seem so. Do they also trawl the blogs in the hope of finding something they can add a note to, in the desperate hope that I will start a conversation with them? I tried this, but it led to nothing. No response whatsoever.

There are so many blogs out there (so many on Blogger alone that by the time I've uploaded my latest guff, I've already been surpassed by enough blogs to cut me out of ever appearing on the most recently uploaded site!) that it's a wonder anyone finds anyone any more.

Perhaps the truth is that only computers spidering the blogs find other blogs interesting. The rest of us have enough trouble keeping up with our own.