Hello world! Welcome to Blogscapes: An exploration into the blogosphere of blogs!

This is a self-conscious blog. This is a blog about blogs and blogging.

This is my first foray into such an endeavour. Do I start with “Dear Diary”? Well, who are we kidding here – the blog is no personal diary – you are sharing your thoughts with the rest of the world, you know.

Or should it be “Once upon a time, a blog was born…”. Oops, wrong genre. Anyway, that’s not very accurate, as a blog is born every minute, I think, judging by the growing trend of blogging today! (Guess who’s jumping on the bandwagon, or the blogwagon on the cyberhighway, but let’s hope it doesn’t become a blandwagon! …Are you still there?) 

 “Why am I doing this?” Let’s start with this question. This is one of the key questions you are supposed to ask before you embark, or wait, you’re supposed to adopt a conversational tone… so before you start having your own blog – before you add your blog to the trillions out there in the new blogosphere today.

There are enough blogs out there that churn out drivel. Let’s face it – unless you are Angelina Jolie or Brad Pitt, who would be interested in what you ate for breakfast or if your dog is trying a new fat-free diet? Now, at the risk of sounding pretentious or academic, and hence turning away you, my (potential) reader, this blog is part of my exploration into the new media form called the weblog. 

I’ve been doing some reading to help me get a foothold into the new blogscape, and currently, am reading a pretty helpful book by McBride and Carson entitled “Teach Yourself Blogging”. What? You may ask, what’s there to teach or learn about blogging? You just log on and … blog! You may be right, but then, there’s no harm getting some extra tips from the experts, right? Oh, and I just found out that the term blog was developed by one of the founding fathers of blogging, Peter Merholz. He playfully turned Weblog into we blog. That’s how the term blog was born! Interesting, don’t you think?

Anyway, like I’ve mentioned earlier, this blog will be an exploration for me, into the world and workings of blogging, and I invite you to take this journey with me, as I discover more and more about what makes a blog tick, and why some blogs work better than others, and I just realised that this sentence is too long, something you should not have in web writing! (You are realise that I’m conscioulsy trying to work in more paragraphing too!)

Perhaps by now, you would have an idea of why the blog is called “Blogscapes”. It’s a take on the word “landscapes”. Not only that, it also seems to encapsulate within it, an idea of “escape”, which in a way, is what a blog writer does, when he ‘escapes’ into his blogworld. Mind you, blogging can be a pretty solitary activity. Sure, you are connected to the WWW blogosphere, but for that moment that you are penning your thoughts, you are very much on your own.

This blog has pretty high expectations of itself. It wants to be read; it wants to be heard; it wants to be of service to the expanding world of blogscapes out there. It hopes to help its writer and others out there (students, educators, bloggers, non-bloggers…) make better sense of the world of blogging and other forms of new media.

Notwithstanding what I mentioned about the solitary act of blogging, the blog would not exist if it were not for its readers, and its connections to the other blogs, so I invite you to make that connection with me and my blog. 

Blogscape Artist