It's not that easy though, making this web log good-looking and giving it a personality too. What with exams, articles, deadlines, tax-forms and other life-clogging chores, time to tinker with Blogsworth gets sidelined.
So I've only added one feature - it seemed the most urgent: an email address. I'm looking for a per-posting comment box, but wasn't able to find a decent one in the last half hour, so if there are any suggestions compatible with blogger they'd be snaffled immediately.
I sit back in awe of those Blogs that serve their purpose so well - whether it's my little sister's who keep in contact with old school buddies through a personal blog, or the dynamic No Fear blog, with its clean layout of daily updates on things current and disturbing (The name No Fear made me expect either a skater's site or a life coach's, but this is happily neither).
It appears to me that once a momentum builds up, blogging is something that snowballs, like it has in America, Brazil and now England too. In New York, for example, you can find other web-loggers who live on the same subway stop as you, and in the UK there's a similar thing with postcodes. In Ireland, there being neither a metro system nor more than 24 zip-codes, the snowball is bound to take on a different shape whenever it starts rolling. Wonder what that shape will be? For now, linking into the Pepys Project which lists online diarists geographically around the world will have to do for me.

Ah now that’s getting more interesting: I have direct evidence that at least six people scanned their eyes over Blogsworth since my last posting. This can only be because of my attention-seeking behaviour.
The most effective action was emailing Biz Stone. A blogger of considerable repute Biz’s status in the blogosphere (see – I’m getting the lingo) is such that people buy his book to find out how he puts together an effortlessly engaging daily fix of links and commentary. The self-proclaimed genius put a link to Blogsworth on his page... generous genius.
Then I created the link to Bloghop, a site which adds the feature at the bottom of this page enabling people to rate Blogsworth. The first judgement I got was somebody “hated it”… that was all the response I had for days. It was only when four others enthused “I love it!” that I came round to instant feedback, something print media shields you from.
And my own rating? Blogsworth certainly isn’t the best web-log on the internet, but it’s not the worst. In time, using some of the links commentators have sent me, Blogsworth’ll improve. (Am trying out Blogsnob top-left-hand-corner ad– thank you Ano Nymous)
I’m following advice now actually: post more frequently, and when interested people come back there’s something for them. There was a health warning attached however: the more you blog, the more addictive it gets. Is this goodbye social life?

A week – more than a week – passes. Nobody emails me, no one cares. I feel like a tree falling in the forest with no existence-affirming person around to see or hear. This is being lost in cyberspace, and I have to do something to get on the map.
I’ve posted my site to a few online lists and emailed a couple of people to tell them to notice me. And all the while one web log is getting all the attention it deserves. Where is Raed, the journal of an Iraqi man giving his day-to-day insight of beleaguered Baghdad beats much of the reporting by major networks in terms of providing a gripping, humorous, searing account of being bombed.
… I could tell you what’s out of my window in Dublin, but it doesn’t really compare, does it? Instead, I'm going to search the corners of the internet for the best web-logs now, to see how to find them and find out what raises them above my attempt here. As always, feel free to tell me where I’m going wrong!

So blogger, you say you’ll publish what I write instantly on the web do you? And there’s no editor - no filter - so when I idly scribble the world gets to look on or (better idea) ignore me totally? Is this freedom at last? If so, what price this freedom? The obvious problem (for a journalist) is that no-one is paying for this writing and I’ve no sub-editor to blame for my spelly mistakes. But these are worldly worries. Face it – what I’m really scared of is that in the noise of the Internet, nobody will notice me. And why would they?

There are millions of web loggers, live journal writers, bloggers or whatever you want to call them, out there. There they go, tappety-tap, updating their web pages, putting up a journal entry, punching in a comment, or posting to somebody else’s site. They talk about anything you can think of, tell each other of good articles they saw on their way to this particular page, and give accounts of what they found interesting that day, whether their day was shopping in Dunnes Stores or making preparations to leave their home in Baghdad. Of course America has the most weblogs, but Ireland’s getting in on the act too.

I’m writing this to find out what the deal is with web-logs while I’m writing one. Feel free to give me your opinions and observations (like how to sort out my punctuation glitches) and you never know… this might get published in a paper newspaper – after the editor has agreed, and the sub-editor has ironed out the typos, and I’ve got paid, of course.