My nephew Ross back in auld Scotia is so immersed in the world of blogging that he is surely developing webby fingers. On a recent trawl through his deep sea of archives in Basic Craft, I found a pertinent post on how unreliable online measurement systems can be.

Ross quotes from The Economist, an occasionally dull but always worthy UK periodical whose name, for once, sums up its content. (Having said that, the publication is responsible for commissioning some of the best copy-only advertising in English – ever. You’ll see some on their site.)

The article describes trying to extract meaningful webstats as trying to sip water from a fire hose.

Ross has much that’s sensible to say about many things — including the fickle nature of Facebook fads. But nothing yet on the next new thing – nepotism on the net!

Interested parties, including at least one blogmeister, have been in touch with helpful insight.The first piece of advice is to be shorter. The second comment is that in the Scots language, my mother tongue, the phrase is expressed as ‘cobbler’s bairns’. Bairns being children. The third useful insight is to have lots of interesting links. So here is one to the online Scots dictionary which needs a serious visual redesign but seems to work – http://www.dsl.ac.uk/dsl/index.html