Only a woman with an unquenchable desire for a headache and blurred vison could possibly tune into Blogland after a day mostly spent on the computer doing family history research.  But I am that woman.    After the PC problems of the last few days, I thought I'd better spend a bit of time exploring blog.co.uk a bit more - in case it is me rather than the computer that is the problem.

I don't want to moan about Blog.co.uk - I truly don't - because the amount of pleasure I get out of it far outweighs the very occasional niggle.  So please consider the following  as a mere musing.  But why is it so difficult to discover fellow bloggers? 

Most of the blogs I know about come from visiting the friends of friends.  It's the best way I've yet discovered on discovering other people.  But the drawback is that these tend to be the ones that blog at similar times, and I assume that there are other 'communities' that blog early in the day or much later in the evening that I never get to see. 

The directory is far too time-consuming.  Today, I ploughed through the A's and E's (looking for other Ellies, but then belatedly realised that wasn't my blog name - told you I was a computer fool!) .  To begin with, I thought I'd stumbled onto the Yellow Pages - (think AAAAAAAAA111111111 Plumbing Services).  Then I thought I'd strayed into business blog land (Earnloadskindofnames).  When I eventually got to 'real' bloggers, over 95% I clicked on were empty.  Many had one entry and had then been abandoned months, even years ago.  Some were in a foreign language.   It's a depressing thought that no blogs ever get deleted, however long they are unused or empty, and the directory will eventually have millions of names.

After 30 attempts I found just two current bloggers.   I simply can't afford that kind of time.  The only other way I know of is to look at featured blogs - and big congrats to my mates Tylluan, Lindow, Eagle Kev and Usky who feature there.  But these are more useful for new users, as some of the blogs featured remain unchanged for long periods, whlst others pop in and out for one day only and can be missed.

So am I missing a trick?  Is there a way of sorting the directory so only current users come up in a list?  If there is, someone let me know, please - before I go and lie down in a dark room!