What's all this about, then?

Now, why would you be reading this?   No offence meant - it was a genuine question.   Apart from people who know me and might make the effort to visit a blog like this once in a while (probably to spare my feelings more than anything), why would anybody else be interested?

If I were in the public consciousness, that would be different.   If I were a politician, journalist or broadcaster (rather than an aspiring one), there would undoubtedly be a whole swathe of people tracking my every blogged utterance - but I'm not.    And that's why I have a slight problem with the 'blogosphere'.   It all seems just a little bit conceited.   Cue the digital obsessives who'll be wailing how, to use the well-worn phrase of the year, I "just don't get it."

So having spectacularly failed to answer the first question, here comes another.   Given all that, why am I adding my voice to the ever increasing background hum of comment, opinions and unnecessary bile?   Well, hopefully, I'll manage to avoid the bile element of the proceedings for a start.   The overriding reason, though, is pure self-interest.  

Trainee broadcast journalists up and down the country are having the multi-platform message drummed into them - some of us take a little more drumming than others.     Maybe it's because, on the one hand, I'm being taught how to make finely honed and crafted radio and television packages and, on the other, being told that any old hastily arranged pictures or tatty bit of audio will do so long as it can be thrown into a mash-up (eh?) and flashed around the world in a nanosecond.   It kind of makes you fear for the future of your chosen medium and causes you to resent the brave, new, converged, multi-platform world a little more than you probably should. 

Anyway, having flirted with Twitter (and felt dirty and cheap for the pleasure), I think my contribution to the digital world can best be made here - as a little analogue outpost, gently nudging readers in the direction of those 'traditional' media which our digital cousins talk about with such rancour and vitriol.    Now that probably isn't the spirit in which I've been advised to engage with digital, but at least I've got a blog - what more do you want?