A new director of my establishment had been appointed, and I thought it an excellent chance to point out the virtues of both our organization and our new leader. So I scheduled a press conference, sent out invitations to various media persons, got my subject to the appropriate place, sat her down and waited for reporters to show up.

And waited ... and waited ...

No one, I am ashamed to say, came. It was a fact that my subject, who also was sort of my employer, took to heart. She never had much faith in my PR abilities after that. And, I might add, I lost a certain sense of charisma as well.

Now it has happened all over again.

The latest party to which no one came (or has come so far) was when I set up my own blog site on the Internet. I thought this was a great idea. It was free, I had a few things to say that didn't make it to these newspapers, and so I planned to post a number of essays, some of them longer than space allows in the paper and all, of course, of considerable skill and acumen.

If you're not familiar with blogs, they are sort of an open diary. You write whatever comes to your mind, upload it to your site and wait for other people to react to it by making comments and sending them to you.

It doesn't matter so much what they say. Rather, it is the fact that you know you have some readers out there.

Here I should add some parenthetical comment. Blogs are a relatively new addition to the Internet. There are private blogs, and there are public blogs. Why anyone should want a private blog is beyond me. But public blogs are, it would seem, a great way to send your words winging across the world, falling one knows not where but having some influence somewhere.

However, it is not, it seems, as simple as all that, alas. Unfortunately, there are zillions of blogs across the Internet on literally zillions of subjects.

A lot of them are like diaries. Their writers ruminate about what's happening in their lives (or more likely, what isn't). Sometimes they get readers who respond, and a dialogue gets going.

Sometimes they (or their counterpart, chat rooms) lead to romance. I know a man who recently married a woman from Thailand he "met" this way and another who is romancing a lady from France. Same story. They fell in love via the Internet.

So sometimes things happen. Sometimes, but apparently not too often. Certainly not often with me. I have yet to get a single comment posted on my blog site.

(So you won't think I am writing this piece simply to get you to read my blog, I am not posting its address. If you're really interested, look it up. And I ought to add I am not looking for romance, just more readers.)

And I suppose therein lies the problem with blogs. Most of them, apparently including mine, are not very interesting. Many of them seem to be written by young single people who live alone and who are desperately looking for a conversation with someone. They tell how boring the day was, how sexually frustrated they are, what they had or didn't have for supper and so on.

I don't mean that all blogs are this bad. Indeed, some have become central to political hassles in Washington, and some are, indeed, interesting. But one has to sift through an enormous amount of material to find these diamonds amongst the dross.

Blogs also have been widely touted as a way of every man having his own newspaper or television station, somewhat like a written talk show without the host. I think that's expecting a lot. After all, most blogs are not written by trained journalists but by amateurs. And even if they are like mine (I do fancy myself as a trained journalist with about 40 years of experience), that's clearly no guarantee of readership.

So I guess the jury is still out on the ultimate value of blogs.

Perhaps someday, with some embellishment, they will take an important place in the international culture that the Internet has become. At the moment, though, the shape of that place is difficult for me to see.

But then what do I know? Too often my parties have been a bust.