You know that box-file that you’ve got at home, finely balanced on top of a wardrobe somewhere? Or perhaps it’s wedged under your bed or has been fashioned into some kind of bookend on a shelf in your front room? You know, the file with all of the paperwork that you’ve decided is too important to throw away yet not quite urgent enough to justify a respectable ranking in your week’s to-do list?

Well friends, that’s kind of what this blog has come to represent. Something that yearned to be written yet never manifested due to thinly disguised excuses and months (nay, years) of procrastination.

As somebody who is firmly grounded within the world of social media, it is perhaps slightly strange that it has taken me so long to put dust off my QWERTY keyboard and to start practising what I have been preaching to clients for some years now: getting involved in this blogging lark.

But is it so strange?

I see it like this:

* My optician recently contacted an eye-infection from keeping her contact lenses in too long
* My hairdresser has an unkempt head of hair which could benefit from a swift short-back-and-sides
* My GP smokes cigars
* My dentist has halitosis (Not only does he ‘not do NHS’, it would appear the he doesn’t do Wrigley’s gum either)

Yet (and this is the thing that surprises me), I consider them all to be great at what they do.

I’ve been ‘consuming’ blogs now for five years. Google Reader is my life-support. If I go a day without reading my RSS feeds, I am left with over 1,000+ posts to sift through. It takes a few hours every day to read my feeds. I usually take an hour in the morning, half an hour over lunch and then my commute home to catch up on what’s going on out there in the big wide Blogosphere (note to self: NEVER use that word again. It’s an ugly word. In fact, anything with -o’sphere added to it is clearly wrong and dare I say, lazy!). It’s an addiction. An obsession. I love it.

Yet up until now, I haven’t been a blogger.

I have justified this with the following logic:

A film critic, inhales films. He eats, sleeps, breathes cinema. He may go to his local Odeon three times a week, buy all of the film review magazines, religiously follow the latest DVD releases, have his TV locked to FilmFour and he may have IMDB set as his permanent homepage. He may even at a push be able to recite by heart all of the opening lines of the collective works of Woody Allen. There would be little doubt that this fella is an expert in film. What he isn’t though, is a film director.

Extending this logic to my own situation, I would argue (and have done so ad nauseum for the past few years) that whilst I consider myself to understand the anatomy of a blog and the way that the wider community works, I don’t have to fully immerse myself in the medium in order for me to do my job.

Right?

(Well maybe)

All I know is that you can only ignore that box-file of paperwork before you have to make a decision.

Good friends and worldly wise bloggers have been a great support and source of encouragement for me to start up this blog. Thanks to Jonathan Macdonald, the guys at ShinyMedia, Ewan Macleod and others who make it look so easy. A recent blogger engagement event that I helped to organise on behalf of a client made me realise that I’m no longer happy to watch on from the sideline: I want in. And here I am.

For more info about what all this is about, go here.

Now that I’ve started this blog, I’ll probably never get around to clearing out that pile of paperwork. Oh well… can’t do it all, you know.

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