So I took a little trip.

I started clicking the "Next Blog" link on the top of blogger/blogspot blogs and thought I would see where it took me. I've looked through a few hundred blogs in the last few days, and most of them are, as I said before, not worth even a few seconds of my time. What I found:

• A bunch of blogs set up just to advertise stuff. It's the spammer's way of getting high Google rankings. Most of them are just post titles with keywords for the products and links, but here's an interesting one; it has a title for the product it's advertising, then a snippet of what looks like a Greek tragedy (Update 11/19/04: Actually, the Greek tragedy bit is apparently from Shakespeare's Coriolanus, and it seems the rest are random bits from Shakespeare's collected works), and then a link to the product it's trying to sell. Strange.
• A bunch of foreign-language blogs, mostly in Spanish, though I found some in Portugese, French, Dutch, Italian, Arabic, Farsi, Chinese, and Japanese. There may have been some Polish and Tagalog ones in there, but as I wouldn't know either language written, I can't be sure if that's what they were.
• A couple of educational blogs; that is, blogs used for classes to toss around assignments, paper proposals, etc. An excellent use of the service.
• A few exceptionally badly-written blogs.
• A whole lot of mediocre blogs.
• And some interesting ones:
  • World Class Cuiscene: a blog with Filipino and other recipes.
  • Jeff Seale: This blog's author was suffering from some kind of cancer, and had started the blog as a way to keep his family and friends up to date on his situation. The last post was dated October 14th, two days after he had surgery to remove some cancerous lymph nodes. I have no idea whether he made a full recovery or not.
  • K.J.R.: The first Japanese blog I came across in my search, this one was started just yesterday. I haven't puzzled through all of the posts yet, but I find it interesting not because of the content, but because it's in Japanese and would be great translation practice for me. Woo!