No-one ever asks me: ‘Hey Norman, why don’t you have a blogroll with 457 interesting, thought provoking sites for me to look at ?’. Firstly, while I find the reading lists of others interesting and a useful means of discovering new sources, I don’t particularly want an lengthy blogroll adding yet more clutter to my (sort of) minimalist blog. Secondly, my RSS reading lists are stored on a Netvibes server. I have separate tabs for ‘Oracle’, ‘WordPress’, ‘Sport’, ‘News’, ‘Blogs’, ‘Tech’, ‘Software’ and a small one called ‘UK’. I would love to be able to publish these tabs and share the contents with everyone. ...

A trawl across the blogosphere revealed that hardly anyone, with any sense, hosts a blog at Yahoo 360' or Bloglines which is very surprising indeed. Or maybe not.

The ‘Metro’ is a free, lightweight, disposable newspaper, aimed at commuters, which is solely funded by advertising revenues. So lightweight, you can finish it by the time you reach Waterloo but at least it saves you the embarrassment of staring at your neighbour for 27 minutes. Last month, The Metro reported the exciting news that a quarter of all UK internet users maintain a blog. Hurrah ! However, the veracity of this claim is immediately subverted by the statement that ‘59% of bloggers choose to make it public.’ So, this implies that 41% of UK bloggers are blogging in private, by invitation only, to friends and family or in complete isolation. I know the British are reserved but that is simply ridiculous. ...

It really is in a right old state. I have a Netvibes tab called ‘UK’. It has a solitary, uninspiring, dry news feed from the BBC. Don’t get me wrong. I enjoy a lot of blogs from UK authors. Some are (Scottish) technical types in the Oracle blogging community with a sense of humour while others are Brits who have moved to foreign shores or very talented and dedicated WordPress techies. Clearly, this is highly unsatisfactory and slightly underwhelming. I am certain there must be a wealth of witty, interesting, fascinating blogs out there written by British people but I just can’t find them. ...

Norman Brightside, a little known UK blogger from the London (near England), was reeling yesterday from a cataclysmic, violent (yet unwanted) backlash of media inspired attention from Web 2.0 types in response to the impromptu and inadvertent release of 1367 GB of search data (including IP addresses, referrer data, explicit search terms and agent identifiers) from the Web server farm that hosts his incredibly popular blog. Brightside is an IT genius who had developed his Web server tracking technology using advanced AI techniques to include the screen name of the AOL user, the room they were actually surfing from, what they were actually thinking, the strength of each individual key press together with the facial expression used when typing in search terms. ...