Shelley Howells: A headfirst dive into the weird and wonderful world of the bloggers

In a case of can't beat, so join, I set out to find some web logs I'd want to revisit.

Because blogs - like them or not - are where you'll hear of new/odd/interesting websites first, and are the best places to find out what's going on in net communities.

Instead, in a case of "she has the attention-span of a gnat", I found myself gripped and distracted by the wide range of web log directories, lists and search engines.

In addition to lists like Weblogs.com that catalogue recently updated blogs, blog search tools and most popular blog rankings like those found on Bloghop, there are all manner of quirky blogophile bits and pieces - many more interesting than the blogs to which they link.

Particularly appealing are sites that save the trouble of visiting blogs at all - they just collect the data you are interested in.

All Consuming trawls updated blogs to come up with a list of what bloggers are reading, and what they are saying about books.

Hillary Clinton and Harry Potter are recent top reads. Other interesting-looking topical books include Branded: the Buying and Selling of Teenagers, and Amanda Bright@Home - a novel that they say is the stay-at-home mum's version of I Don't Know How She Does It (a bitterly humorous account of a working mother's life).

The Eatonweb portal lets you browse blogs by categories such as anime, children and death as well as by country of origin, and Bloginality lets you find bloggers who share your personality type.

The quick personality test concluded I'm an ISFP (introverted, sensing, feeling, perceiving), a type apparently less likely than others to take to the blogging life.

Certainly, the handful of ISFP-authored blogs had me vowing to change personality. Now.

Daypop's main job is to search web logs, but its word bursts section is a great place to go for random links to what bloggers are writing about, rather than what they are linking to (as seen on the blogging ecosystem). It picks up "heightened usage of certain words in weblogs within the last couple of days".

Instead of reading them, try your luck at making some virtual money from favourite blogs on Blog Shares, a fantasy stock market for blogs.

Players invest a fictional $500 and blogs are valued links.

Award-winning blogs can be bound on the Bloggies web log awards site.

The antidote to all that back-slapping is the Anti-bloggies where categories include least updated blog, most dead links and most likely to have a cheese sandwich.

Despite all that fascinating blogtrivia, I did find a couple of beaut weblogs.

The Dullest Blog in the World is exquisitely just that: "I was standing next to a wall and began to feel a little tired. I leaned to the side against the wall and continued to adopt this slightly more comfortable posture for several moments."

Pepys Diary reinvents the 17th-century diarist as a blogger by presenting one of his original diary entries each day.

It's bursting with handy annotations and background information and proves that, despite all the gadgetry, we haven't changed much.

In a column a while back, I whinged about Webby Award nominee Visual Thesaurus site freezing the Mac. A week later, I received an email from the head honcho, offering to help with the problem. How's that for service?

The problem was, as suspected, that I'm running the old OS9 system.

So they pointed me to the classic version.

It works a treat and has an advantage over the hard-copy thesaurus in that it is easy - and rather beautiful - to see the connections between words. No more bunging fingers and thumbs between pages to keep track of word searches.

* Email Shelley Howells

Weblogs.com

Blog Hop

All Consuming

Eatonweb Portal

Bloginality

Daypop

Blogging ecosystem

Blog Shares

2003 Bloggies

Antibloggies

The Dullest Blog in the World

Pepys Diary

Visual Thesaurus

Visual Thesaurus Classic