I don’t read an awful lot of blogs, but the ones I do tend to be the conversational, diary or commonplace book types: unrelated scraps of news or observation or nonsense. They’ve no greater aim than to share their interests and sense of humour with other likeminded people who spend too much time in front of a computer. People like Boz or Dan or Billy or Jamie can obviously string a sentence together, and have read a book or two, and have interesting things happening in their lives, or can turn the uninteresting bits of their lives into something worth reading about, and that’s what keeps me coming back for more. They don’t claim that their blogs are daily journals or great historical records. They’re simply somewhere for intelligent, funny, interesting people to riff on whatever takes their fancy. And that’s enough, for me. The continual bleat of people who don’t get Teh Internez is that it’s an orgy of solipsistic tedium – but I’m happy to read about somebody making a cup of tea or going to the dentist or whatever it is we all do to fill the time before the grave if they can give it a spin that makes it interesting to read. And if you can get a laugh from it, all the better.

And I suppose it’s because I flatter myself that I have some of the aforementioned attributes, and because I have an online life (trans: twitters and looks at stupid things on YouTube), that I started this blog. But I’ve had cause to ask recently what its value is. I’ve experienced a great sadness over the past month or so, but this blog isn’t and was never meant to be confessional; while I’m happy to share some of my life online, there’s much that I keep to myself.

That means that I haven’t regularly added anything here for a while. Which is OK, of course. The world still seems to be turning. But it’s raised the question for me of how much this is a two-way process. It’s through reading other blogs and, importantly, commenting on them that a conversation develops. That’s the great value of them, it seems to me – that while they are, of course, authored, other voices being able to comment gives them a value, stops them being the very thing that critics accuse them of (unless you take the view that you create a small coterie of navel gazers. But that’s unfair and, I think, untrue).

How, though, do you encourage that dialogue if you keep yourself out of the picture?

IN SUMMARY: Discuss.