“The public have an insatiable curiosity to know everything,” wrote Oscar Wilde in The Soul of Man Under Socialism, “except what is worth knowing.”

Few things bear this out more convincingly than the world of blogging (or, as it winsomely styles itself, the blogosphere). While older readers adjust their ear trumpets, it is perhaps worth pointing out that blogging is the increasingly popular pastime of placing one’s daily diary on the internet, the term blog being a contraction of “web log”.

Unconstrained by the need to be interesting in any way whatsoever, blogs are the background radiation of the intellectual realm, the white noise of the collective unconscious, scrolling out their narratives whether anybody wishes to read them or not.

In one sense a Warholian tribute to the fascination of banality, blogs confirm Martin Amis’s claim that where once it was thought that everyone had a book in them, that book has now become an autobiography. My personal favourite, for instance, is Life Begins at 50, an overweight Glaswegian’s account of getting fit: “Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a gym junkie,” it drones hypnotically. “I’m not trying to build a perfect body. I just want to keep reasonably fit.”

Usually, when the writer is disclosing their breakfast choice or the difficulty of sourcing new recordings by the James Last Orchestra, these revelations merely complete a closed circuit of irrelevance, though there can be more troublesome outcomes: Joe Gordon, a worker at Waterstone’s bookshop in Edinburgh, was sacked in February for referring to his employers as “evil” and “Bastardstone’s” in his blog, the Woolamaloo Gazette (though he was later given a job by the Forbidden Planet chain, who loved it).

After a similar case involving an airline steward, many large US firms have instituted blogging policies for their employees. Dear Raed, meanwhile, the politically explosive blog of a young man in Baghdad, is still rumoured to be a disinformation project run by the CIA or Mossad.

Our appetite for this consensual rubbernecking and our tolerance for the wholly irrelevant was confirmed this week by the news that blogs have made it into Fortune magazine’s top 10 list of high-tech trends, and with the White House accepting its first blogger, Garrett M Graff, into the presidential press corps, even though the Supreme Court has decreed that blogging is several rungs down the evolutionary ladder from journalism.

Scotland has spawned a plenitude of its own blogs (appropriately for a form that specialises in benign monotony), corralled into www.scottishblogs.co.uk. It is the perfect means of judging how weirdly self-reflexive our fellow citizens are becoming.

There are 179 Scottish blogs listed, from first-hand advice on sourcing peat on Berneray to the latest doings of the Oakleaf Circle pagan networking group in Dumfries & Galloway (“Fran has more or less taken over the ritual side of things,” it reveals. “And Carol is marshalling everyone for recycling and rubbish collection.”) “I found it very hard to find other Scottish bloggers and this seemed like a solution,” says Gordon McLean, the originator and administrator of the site. “It was the first time I’d tried something like this, but I’ve been very pleased with its continued success. The site currently receives about three new blogs a week. I’m sure there are many more out there, though not everyone wants to be listed.”

As astonishing as it is to think that computer geeks might shy from human contact, bloggers, it seems, can be a furtive and elusive bunch, preferring the one-way mirror of their controlled solitude to the messy complexities of real people.

“Last year I tried to arrange a meeting of Scottish bloggers in Edinburgh,” says McLean, “but it was badly organised and only one other blogger made it. Scottish bloggers are a little behind our southern counterparts but they have the advantage that so many of them are so close together. The social side of blogging is coming on in Scotland, though the tipping point, where blogging becomes part of the mainstream, is still way off in Scotland. But we’re getting there.”

Testifying, perhaps, to the proliferation of telecottaging, there are at least 10 bloggers in the Highlands and Islands, a surprising number given that most people are still suspiciously sniffing mobile phones up there.

Adventures of a Freelancer recounts the musings of a particularly thoughtful teuchter: “I do on occasion,” she writes, “find myself wondering how much I am being controlled by the forces which the symbolism of my star sign represents.” The Highland Warrior page, meanwhile, takes a more practical approach to life’s dilemmas: “The LIMAWS(R) guided multiple rocket launcher,” it discloses, “is one-third the weight of the army’s existing weapon but still packs the same devastating punch.”

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