The problem weith vastly expanding a blog's readership as we have done recently, is that once the blog starts to register on the radar it attracts comments that are really nothing to do with anything the bloggers have written.

Take the recent post The Receding Prospect of Happiness which ended on a tongue in cheek comment about a family friend who has just set up as a manufacturer of bespoke Yurts.

Sure enough, along came one of the "I-take-myself-very-seriously-and-so-will-everyone-else" brigade, ranting on about how far we have come since the medieval era when people faced a daily struggle to survive and how people with a utopian view of medieval life are living in cloud cuckoo land. Everyone is entitled to their opinion of course but readers of this blog know Little Nicky Machiavelli is a proponent of technical progress tied to social need rather than the unbridled market forces that are truly driving us back towards the medieval sewer.
Two years ago this blog was predicting the cynically enginerered housing boom would all end in tears as people found themselves in near - slavery to their mortgage providers (how medieval is that?)
Well the rest of the world is just catching up. Read this view from and economist: Mortgaging Our Future - Neal Lawson

I tend to agree with uberblogger Andrew Keen who often complains that one of the great nonsenses of the web is that people do not read before commenting.