Can I be a blogger when I is all growed up?

I have spent the vast major­ity of today dread­ing the arrival of the new year. For once, this is not due to immensely per­sonal insec­ur­it­ies and deeply-held psy­cho­lo­gical fears about spend­ing the next twelve months des­per­ately alone, unloved and unwanted. Not yet, any­way. They don’t gen­er­ally creep into my dis­eased mind until some time around 27 Decem­ber. No, the reason for the sense of impend­ing doom — doom, doom and more doom! — is rather dif­fer­ent on this occasion.

Thanks to a morn­ing email heads-up from the esteemed Gold­fish, I was quickly aler­ted to a BBC News story report­ing that 2007 is going to be the year of the blog. Within an instant, I could feel my heart sink­ing through the floor, scream­ing for mercy as it plunged into the murky depths.

You see, I’m old enough, ugly enough and, sadly, have been blog­ging long enough to remem­ber the suc­ces­sion of end of year round-ups from BBC News since — oh, let me think — at least 2002 onwards, con­fid­ently report­ing that the pre­vi­ous twelve months had also been “the year of the blog”. So how many bloody years has blog­ging had? It seems that the only change for the end of 2006 is that the journ­al­ists have finally got with the lingo and stopped refer­ring to the things as “blogs or web logs” (sic), which always rather reminded me of the way in which my mother quaintly uses the term “the web­site” to refer to the entire inter­net. (“Can you look up some dis­tant rel­at­ives on the web­site? Can you order me some shop­ping on the website?”)

Every year I read these reports and every year, like the BBC’s web and tech­no­logy cor­res­pond­ents them­selves, I end up think­ing the same. Stand in the aver­age bus queue and start telling your fel­low com­muters that you are a blog­ger, and you will not only receive wor­ried stares because you’re dar­ing to break the unspoken rule of not talk­ing to com­plete strangers on pub­lic trans­port, but you will also be met with befuddle­ment. It’s almost heresy to admit this in some circles, but between you and me, blog­ging isn’t really that import­ant. No, it really isn’t. Most people really have very little idea of what a blog is. I still find myself enter­tain­ing the fond notion that many of the for­tu­nately unin­formed think a blog is a small mar­supial, which is mostly to be found spring­ing blithely through the Aus­tralian out­back whilst being shot at by incom­pet­ent hunters.

Mmm. Have you ever eaten freshly-killed blog roas­ted over an open spit? No, me neither. Maybe one day.

Of course, those of you who have known me and read my words for longer than you care to admit will by now be sigh­ing wear­ily and dis­miss­ing this bit­ter, cyn­ical and twis­ted rant as yet another example of me feel­ing aggrieved because my immense con­tri­bu­tion to The World Of Blog has mostly gone unre­cog­nised in my own life­time. I haven’t even won an award, for heaven’s sake. So whilst it’s true that this does indeed make my whole piti­ful exist­ence even more mean­ing­less than it already has been since the dark autum­nal even­ings of Octo­ber 2000, when my blog­ging per­sona first stumbled its way onto the web, it’s not the real reason behind this post. No, the plain and simple truth of the mat­ter is that I’m just fed up to the back teeth with all the excess­ive blog­ging hype that is now rolled out at the end of every year. Every sod­ding year. Like a Christ­mas single by Cliff Richard. Like a ten pound book voucher from your grand­mother. Except infin­itely worse than both.

There is, how­ever, some light at the end of the tun­nel — and no, sorry, it’s not a train head­ing towards me at high speed. Although 2007 is going to be the year of the blog (kill me now, just kill me now), it’s also going to see the “blog­ging phe­nomenon” at last reach its peak — albeit a peak of some 100 mil­lion. That’s 100 mil­lion blogs, folks. 100 mil­lion sites fea­tur­ing pic­tures of cats and pages of sor­row­ful, intro­ver­ted posts about not hav­ing had any sex for the past six months.

Now I come to think of it, that doesn’t actu­ally sound like too bad a basis on which to sell the world of blog­ging, does it? Kit­tens and shag­ging, not neces­sar­ily in that order. Or, indeed, together. No, def­in­itely not together. But since it utterly defeats the point of my argu­ment, I will ignore that digres­sion. Back to the point.

The good news is that although, tra­gic­ally, there are still 100 mil­lion extant blogs, another 200 mil­lion people have already stopped writ­ing them. Some­where on the inter­net lurk 200 mil­lion entries say­ing that the writers don’t have time to post any longer because they have gone out, smelt the cof­fee, taken a breath of fresh air and now real­ise the error of their ways. Let joy be uncon­fined. It’s the start of the slip­pery slope. It’s all down­hill from here. We’re head­ing for obscur­ity and obsol­es­cence. About time too. Any­one got a replace­ment fad? There will be a new one along in a minute, I suspect.

It’s all down to me, of course. Me, me, me. I have per­son­ally man­aged to get rid of 200 mil­lion of the bloody things, and now I have only fifty per cent of that fig­ure to go. Hav­ing made such bril­liant pro­gress, how hard it can be to viciously cull the rest of them? Only then will we finally reach the bliss­ful state of nir­vana where the only blog in exist­ence is mine, still ply­ing its trade in this dank corner of the inter­net. Only then will you all finally fall to your knees and wor­ship me for the genius I really is.

Er, are.

Am, I mean.

Yes, the genius I really am.

There.