Blogs-A Vast Universe of Bots Reading Each Others Stuff? -But Do Any Humans Read Them?

The statistics of this blog include a browser report.  It lists the number of  #requests, #pages per browser agent used to access this blog.   If you look at the list below its a challenge to find the user agent that is used by a human.

In order to sort things out you can search for the user agent using Google or using botsvsbrowsers.com

The first entry is suspicious but is not a KNOWN browser.  However I find it strangly verbose and thus suspect: 

—Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; AT&T CSM8.1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; .NET CLR 2.0.50215; InfoPath.1—

Whereas the following are known obvious bots:   http://tailrank.com/robot, http://www.google.com/bot.html , http://irl.cs.tamu.edu/crawler , http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/ysearch/slurp.  

The fact is as I look at the list carefully I’m suspect of everything on there. I really wonder if this blog phenomena is a bit different than how I would have assumed it to be.  I had no idea before starting it that the main reader of it would be machines.   My suspicion is that people are attempting to automatically detect / aggregate blogs in efforts to wring out Google syndication fees.  I am not sure totally sure.   I’ll assume I’m talking to myself until I prove otherwise.

Since originally writing this note a while back I have noticed in my stats that this article is consistently near the top of the reads.  I assume its other people dissecting their stats figuring out who / what is reading their stuff.