One of the best things about blogging is that you get to (or actually should) read lots of other peoples blogs. What is more, you find yourself reading about things you wouldn’t normally go out of your way to read through books, newspapers or other forms of media. I have discovered that people post some wonderful photos of people and places and some fantastic images of pictures they themselves have created. People write about themselves, sometimes in the third person (a number of medical bloggers do this) which I personally find odd mainly because I can’t imagine myself doing it. They write about others, they write some very intimate things about their personal and work lives (indeed people have lost their jobs over the things they have written). I tend not to write about two of the very prominent blogging topics you find on the internet, by this I mean religion and politics. However I like to read other people’s opinion about these two subjects and their own involvement in them so long as I don’t get the feeling that I am having either rammed down my throat. Where a religious or political topic is written about as if it was the only view that any ‘normal’ person could have (which would suggest that if I don’t agree with it I am of course wrong). Interestingly I find that quite a few medical bloggers write in this kind of preaching, I am right and you are wrong, way. Having said that, there is nothing like boiling blood to spur you on to write a post of your own on a topic even if it not quite the one originally stated.

There are a number of widgets and clock like things you can get to measure things. I have my weather girl who sadly has spent much of the British summer this year in her warmer clothes and I have my sitemeter gadget which tells me who has visited. Other people tell us how many days till their holiday or wedding anniversary and a number of more religious Christian sites have taken to telling us how many babies have died through abortion since the start of the Iraq war. The same sites do not sadly tell us how many innocent Iraqi children have died in the same time span but then that doesn’t fit in with their theme.

I guess the point of this is that as bloggers we have a duty to visit other blogs and read what has been written on various topics. We may or may not agree with what is written, but it is often the very topics that we strongly agree or disagree with that fire us up and make the blog world go round. So ends Julie’s sermon for today (with that bit written in the third person for those people who like that kind of thing!)