Blogs are like faces, everyone seems to have one. I bet you’ve got one. If you haven’t, why not? Perhaps it’s the same reason I didn’t (I’m talking about blogs now, not faces). “Who would possibly want to read anything you had to say”, my mother’s voice would cruelly call out (in my mind). But here we are. It’s 2010, the Tories are back in power, Steve Jobs has us all salivating over his magical thingy and you’re reading something I had to say. So how did we get to this point? Well if you’ve nothing better to do I’ll briefly tell you how I decided that it was worth my time and effort to sit down and write this.

Its 2006 and a fairly new social network was causing a buzz on the interwebs. I had never really got on with Face***k. The poking, the liking, the farms, the groups, the conSTANT FUCKING SUGGESTIONS…I just found it to be an incredibly irritating and unfulfilling drain on my time. The one thing I did like was the short, witty status updates my friends would frequently make and the resulting banter that would arise in the comments below.

So I signed up to Twitter to have a look at what all the fuss was about. I did what I suspect a lot of you tweeters may have done. I followed a few celebrities. No-one I actually knew was on Twitter and even friends who had heard of it considered it “Facebook for old people”. I barely tweeted because I had no followers. What was the point in saying something to effectively an empty room consisting of me and a few celebrity witterings being posted under the door occasionally? At first I found Twitter to be merely a slight distraction. Something to do while waiting for a train, or a dental appointment or tripping the light fantastic. But eventually I started to gain followers. @BritneyFuckVids was one of the first, but I could soon see our relationship was proving to be a little one-sided. She never answered any of my @replies or retweeted any of my humorous observations about Monday mornings.

As time went on, I discovered new, interesting and funny people. These people led me to more interesting and funny people, which introduced me to more and so on…you know how it works. Eventually I began to realise that most of my followees were just normal people, with normal jobs. They weren’t all writers or comedians. But they could be far funnier than a comedian and far more eloquent than a writer. 

And I was interested in what they had to say. I digested their opinions, laughed at their observations and if they said something that didn’t interest me it didn’t matter at all. There were many other tweets to read. I didn’t hold it against them. Just as I don’t hold it against Dave when it shows an episode of Mock The Week for the 58th time. I simply turn over. They’ll soon show an episode of QI I never saw.

But people weren’t confining themselves to just 140 characters. I was amazed to discover how many people had a blog. And why not? As I got used to publicly stating what I was thinking (I definitely had to get used to that), there were many occasions when 140 characters just didn’t seem enough. It’s good to be concise, but you can’t always do a topic justice with “He’s a c**t”. Sometimes you have to elaborate on exactly why he’s a c**t and provide examples of a number of c**tish things he’s said and done.

So I started to consider writing a blog. I read other peoples blogs to see how they did it. Really fucking well as it turns out. I felt at once inspired and demoralised. Inspired to create prose which by rights should be earning some money, yet overcome with a sense of inevitable failure. But in the words of Newell D. Hillis “Failure is blindness to the strategic element in events; success is readiness for instant action when the opportune moment arrives.” I have no idea what he’s going on about but I’m going to presume he’s saying grow a pair and have a go. 

So that’s what I’m doing. Having a go. I hope you’ve enjoyed reading this. But if not, what have you lost? Ok, so a few minutes of your life which you can never have back. Sorry about that. What have I lost? Nothing. But if you have found it slightly interesting, maybe let out the odd titter along the way or simply not been bored while you’ve been waiting for that train, then I’ll consider my time and effort writing this well spent. Or not. It doesn’t really matter.

It's good to be concise.