It started all so innocently. "Wouldn't it be a good idea," I said out loud to myself, "if I had one of those new-fangled blog things?"
The reason I thought it would, in actual fact, be a good idea to have a web-log, or online diary presence, is because I'm exactly the kind of person who asks questions of himself out loud, so deduced from this that I would naturally have a lot to say to the wider internet-using world, or "blogosphere" as I believe the kids are calling it.
So I went and got myself a LiveJournal, which is basically what it says on the tin: a journal. That, presumably, is "live", in that when you wake up at three in the morning with a fantastic thought in your head that you simply have to share with someone, you can switch on your computer, tap away, press a button and it's there for all the world to see.
So I set all this up and posted a few inconsequential nuggets of trivial tripe, and happened to mention to someone (not a real person, a person on the internet) that I had a blog.
"Oh no," they said. "You don't have a blog. You have a LiveJournal. A blog's totally different."
I did ask them how and why a blog was different from a LiveJournal, but to be frank I got a reply that I didn't understand. So I looked into it further and decided that, to cover all bases, I would set up an almost-identical thing to my LiveJournal but using Blogger, a website which has the word "blog" in it so, by definition, must be a blog.
So now I had two blogs. Was I meant to write different things for these blogs, or just post the same stuff twice. If anyone was actually reading the LiveJournal, would they also read my Blogger site, or would it get totally different audiences?
I compromised by doing nothing, but instead getting quite interested by MySpace. Now MySpace is a different beast again, and you may have heard of it in relation to the Arctic Monkeys, the Sheffield Mercury Music Prize winners who, internet legend has it, put themselves about on MySpace and built up a huge fanbase even before they'd released a single.
So I've also gone and got myself a MySpace page, which also has a blog facility and throws up yet more problems - do I write three different blogs, or not? And, more to the point, does anybody out there actually care one way or the other whether I write anything or not?
MySpace does seem to be created with adolescents in mind, so there is also the problem of feeling like a pensioner at a school disco attached to going on there. It also seems to be mainly about creating a huge "friends list", in which you ask other MySpace users to be your friend and they carry a link to your page on their page and vice versa. Making it, in effect, one huge popularity contest and yet another way in which anti-social teenagers can develop even deeper issues.
Being, as regular readers will know, a semi-retired rock god with the almost-comatose band Choppersquad and a fiction novelist of some renown (my mum likes me), I suppose all this web presence is quite useful for promoting stuff should I ever get off my backside and do anything creative.
And the internet is going to get bigger and bigger... newspapers like the T&A are getting more and more involved in the web, as anyone who looks at our new, improved www.thetelegraphandargus website will see.
So much so that my boss, the 'Ead 'Itter, approached me recently and said: "I don't suppose you'd fancy writing a blog for the website, would you..?"
So watch that cyberspace. Now all I have to do is find something else to say...
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