One-way friends

I have a name for some of the people who read my blog: they're my "one-way friends." They've bookmarked my site, so know what's going on in my life and they may even know some of my most personal thoughts, but we never talk to each other; in fact, I may never even have met them. Do you have one-way friends? People whose blogs you occasionally check out, and learn that they've moved, or gotten in a fender bender, or seen something funny on TV, or gotten married and had two kids, and now after spending 90 seconds reading their web page you're all caught up with them and there's just no reason left to talk to them in real life.

There are occasional cases of mutual half-duplex one-way friendship, where I read someone's blog, and that person reads mine, but we never actually communicate with each other. The most likely case of MHDOWF is an old friend who I sent the "Hello this is Mike Tsao from _____, remember me?"-type email, and we ended up bookmarking each other's site, but the purest form is where some random person on the web mentions an entry from my blog, I learn about it from my referrer logs, and then I start reading that person's blog, and pow! new one-way friend.

And then where more than two people are involved, there's the unidirectional daisy-chain friendship...