A blog wouldn't be a blog without some self-referentialism

This morning my friends Kevin and Kathy in Manchester sent my husband Dave an email saying "Word has reached us that your blog-hating wife has set up a blog."

Obviously, in the past few days, since setting up Traffic Light Musing amid a level of self-publicity that friends and family alike have come to expect from me, I've been reflecting upon the whole nature of blogging afresh, as an "insider", as it were.

The World in 2007, published by The Economist, contains an article on Web 2.0 entitled When the hype dies down. It predicts that in 2007, the Web 2.0 hype will abate and meanwhile "the rest of the world - people who may be hearing the words "blog" "wiki" and "podcast" for the first time - will begin to use the new media as they become simple and ubiquitous..." As an aside, the whole point of blog software is surely that it is simple in its essence - taking the complexity out of creating a web content and simplifying stuff like adding graphics and so on..

Back to the main thrust, as an outsider, I made the mistake of seeing blogging as an atomised activity, like a diary. But now that I'm a blogger myself, I see clearly how sociable blogging really is. Since starting my own blog, I'm much more likely to engage in other people's blogs such as my colleague Nadeem's. Instead of being an inward introverted activity, it's just a novel form of communication. Actually, I hardly know Nadeem, as he's fairly new at Talis, and we work on different teams. However, I have insights about his beliefs and thought processes through reading his blog that I would never have obtained from office small-talk, or more arguably, from a personal website.

So if The Economist is right, we'll soon be able to communicate routinely at a new level of depth with pretty much everyone.