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It is difficult to resist the temptation, though, of “the life and thoughts of an island-hopping minister in Argyll”, a lady named Freda, whose interests are listed as “living and dying well”, pursuits not wholly unconnected to her web log entry for last Monday. “It was a mistake to try eating a mussel,” she wrote. “It was cooked and it was in a top restaurant, but it was still a mistake.” The ramifications of her recklessness remain sadly unelaborated, however.

Freda, however, has not let her temporary ailment affect the scale of her blogging. Her website, Island Blogging from Seil, is a complex and hyperlinked one. Most, though, feature rudimentary designs, taken from template software that even the most technophobic computer user can master.

As with the Google search engine, simplistic page designs are considered to be almost a badge of honour to bloggers: most just feature text, rolling and rambling down the page without interruption from such crowd-pleasing features as pictures. The medium is the message — and both can seem exquisitely dull.

Things are a little more lively back at Scottishblogs.co.uk, where a neat little map enables the curious onlooker to interact with this self-selecting group of true life stories and roughly place them within some kind of geographical framework.

Moving east takes us into Grampian and Aberdeenshire, where an Ellon youth writes exclusively for Blogspot, revealing his minute concerns (“As a student I’m always on the lookout for freebies,” he informs us), where the Cyberpunk Cafe is open all hours (“People think the future means the end of history but we haven’t run out of history yet,” it reassures us) and where another page reveals that My Neighbours are Whores! (that “fact” being discerned from the clinching evidence that “while I couldn’t see into the flat, I could see the contents of the coffee table in front of the window”.) Tayside can boast The Diary of a Mental, a poor soul driven to distraction by his occasional employment as a department-store Santa Claus and his malfunctioning computer keyboard. There’s very little of interest from Fife (so no change there then), but Edinburgh and the Lothians teem with the insectoid rattle of fingertips against keys.

There are 59 Edinburgh blogs on McLean’s site, ranging from Ewan’s Musings (this week he’s excited by a new book, Rapid Mobile Enterprise for Symbian OS: An Introduction to OPL Application Design), through “the official blog of the Fischer-Rasmussen family” (no doubt combating the rash of unofficial ones) via Little Blue Teacup (“stories of tea, toast and a final year at Edinburgh University”), the ravings of an “unemployable loon perpetually seeking beer in Edinburgh” and on to the Online Parliamentarian, a vaguely useful site monitoring how our politicians represent themselves on the internet and read, it declares proudly, by “two MSPs, three parliamentary assistants, seven civil servants and two academics”.

Glasgow, meanwhile, produces 37 blogs, mostly students and tech nerds discussing the films they’ve been to see, all paling into insignificance beside a most remarkable blog from the Borders, Martin Frost: A Very Grumpy Old Man. This blog discloses, in agonising detail, its proprietor’s complex and occasionally very odd musings on global terrorism, anti-semitism, his father’s stint in the commandos, his own insolvency, growing old gracefully, ill-health, suicide and virtually any other topic that can be written about with misplaced capital letters and exclamation marks.

“Over the forthcoming months,” he writes, amazingly, “the site will be radically updated and enlarged.” A one-man Central Office of Information, Frost has clearly devoted his life to blogging, with results that make you wonder nervously what he might have done had the internet never been invented.

The rest, on the other hand, simply make you ponder the processes that denied the bloggers the quotient of recognition and acknowledgment that prevent normal people’s diaries from escaping their desk drawers.

Blogs are electronic megaphones, and they turn what was once personal and anecdotal into tiny stitches in the vast tapestry of common knowledge. Virtually none of it is of any use to a reader. But read enough of them, and you suspect that the end-user is the last thing blogging is about.

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