There's the blogger who treats their blog as a personal journal, that they carry with them all the time, capturing streams of consciousness, driven by events occurring during their every waking hour. Now, I've nothing against folk like that, but it seems to me that these exist to flatter the ego of the blogger. Obviously. After the initial curiousity, interest, indifference, irritation, aggression and pure hatred of a few minutes, you swear you'll never read a blog again.

Then there's the blogger who believes that by blogging, they are are contributing something to world peace, order, mankind, the advancement of science, liberty or software testing. (Hey ma, what's software testing?) These folk tend to work in call-centres, record stores or read Kafka. They tend to be trying to break basic rules of topology by placing inappropriate parts of their anatomy inside other parts. Or something like that. Maybe I'm being cruel. You bet.

Now then there's the blog as advertising stream. Now we're getting there. I cannot possibly understand why, but the pages on this blog were hit 1700 times by some robot called bloglines. This is considerably more than the gagboil engine. Who on earth are they? What has bloglines to do with me? Nothing, but I guess other blog engines have nothing better to do than build infinitely large cross references to other blogs. But 1700 times? There are only a dozen or so posts on the site for pete's sake. This is more like a denial of service attack. Yes, I know I can edit my robots.txt file to send them away, but I kind of like seeing unwanted visitors struggling. A bit like watching jehovah's witnesses pressing doorbells that don't work. Or doorbells that do work while ducking under the window. But that's another story.

Then there's people who create websites that are so insanely obscure they've never had a visitor. They think by adding a blog and by-jingo!! providing a link back to their site, they'll increase traffic. Not if the blog is as dull as their website. In fact it'll do the opposite. The blogger probably used all the content and innovation on their homepage. Their blog is worse.

Then there's people like me. Bloggers like me. (Am I allowed to call myself a blogger? Will 'real' bloggers get angry at me?) To continue. I'm Blogging because I'm kinda waiting for something to happen. Or rather, I blogged, waited for something to happen, and nothing much did. Well maybe it did, but I didn't notice. I think I have the same approach to gardening. You buy seeds, you dig a hole and toss the seeds in and whack on a barrel or two of water. And not much happens. By the time I remember I planted seeds in April, its December. Whatever grew - died.

I think it's the same with blogs. You post an entry, and can be quite pleased with yourself. Good job! But a week later you've forgotten all about it, you've moved on in your thinking anyway, and you can't do any more blogging because your back is playing up. Gardening and blogging don't mix, I've decided.

So - why am I blogging now? Well I think I'd better get some practice in before embarking on a series of blogs focused on test assurance, automation, management, certification, risk management and measurement aimed fairly, and hopefully squarely at the software gardening, oops, testing community.

Or maybe I'm just bored.