Telling the world (well, Bath!!) about our blogs

This is a (slightly edited) copy of the article I have written for the Bath Chronicle and which is printed on Thursday, December 4.
If you are here because you actually read that article - which is of course about blogging - then welcome aboard!!!!
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At the Chronicle we pride ourselves on being very innovative and ahead of the game. As you may be aware, we were the first newspaper in Britain (and possibly much further afield than that) to convert from being a paid-for daily title to a paid-for weekly one.

Our reward for such imagination is that we were made the Newspaper of the Year last week as you may have seen elsewhere on this blog. (I am pictured above picking up the award with my deputy Paul Wiltshire - on the left - and the President of the Newspaper Society Michael Pelosi in the centre).

However, this week our latest innovation isn’t something that has made us the first in the world because there are already an estimated, ahem, 112 million people who have got there ahead of us.

For this week I and my Chronicle colleagues have finally entered the curious world of the blogosphere.

We have today unveiled on our website six different blogs written by staff members at the Chronicle including of course this one. I aim to use the blog not only to put all of my printed columns/comments online but also to write things during the course of the week about events or people within the city I would like to talk about.

I do hope some of you may get the chance to pop in to all the Chronicle blogs at http://www.thisisbath.co.uk/blogs.html.

Of course, getting noticed in blogsville is hard in reality as there is a blog (and blogging genre) for just about every subject imaginable – and many you probably couldn’t imagine in the first place. Just a bit of ferreting around enabled me to discover the following type of blogs – linklogs, tumblelogs, phlogs, moblogs, spamblogs, bananablogs, warblogs and sketchblogs And trust me, only one of those is invented. (It's bananas by the way!!)

Of course (as ever), by hosting these blogs the internet is only replicating what we’ve always done in ‘real’ life. Diary writing in print has been a tradition in this country for centuries and has spawned many classic pieces of work. It also spawned many lesser works of great art (!) such as my own rambling diaries which I enthusiastically kept between the ages of 15 and 23.

On the rare occasions I flick through those yellowing pages, I’m really glad I didn’t succumb to the temptation to throw them away as I got older because they really do offer a unique insight into a period of your life.

The last time I dipped into them I was amazed at both how much and, conversely, how little I had changed.

Many of the opinions I had at the age of 16 or 17 have stayed with me, but at other times, I read words I had written about the person I was and wondered ‘just who is this guy?’

So, as I now enter the blogosphere, I hope it will act as a modern-day diary of my life in and around the city which I’ll be able to look back on with the same fondness as I now regard The Secret Diaries Of Sam Holliday Age 17 3/4.

Happy blogging.