I am read by robots

Made an unnerving discovery today.

You remember I said that no one may be reading my blog? Well, I went back to the blog's dashboard and checked to see if it had any "comments." That is, I looked to see if anyone who had read the page had left remarks.

I was startled to find that there were far more comments than I'd thought. Several of my entries appeared to have been quite popular. It was amazing and I was delighted.

But, then I went and looked at the comments themselves. Some were real. I mean, some had been clearly left by real people who had really read the pieces and had some remark to make.

However, the vast majority were no such things. They were left by marketing software designed to search the web for any blog, post a canned comment to one or more of the entries ("Great Blog!") and then conclude with a link to some commercial site. ("Oh, and visit my webpage, 'IncreaseTheSizeOfYourPenis.blognot.XXX).

Thus I find that I may be read, but mostly by spambots.

Ah well. Maybe it is fitting. We see reports of how more and more news and non-fiction is being written by robots.

Maybe it is only fair that the audience, too, should be synthetic.