Getting to grips with the blog

This feels similar to early adventures in writing computer code. Remember the days of the ZX spectrum and typing something along these lines on your rubber keyboard:
 
10 TYPE "Hello World"
20 GOTO 10
 
For someone who professes to be interested in new technology and the web, I've been incredibly slow to try and catch up with the blogging bandwagon.
 
I've heard the word, and vaguely understood the concept, but I'm afraid, until now, I've regarded blogs and bloggers in the same light as some of those early personal webpages – vanity publishing.
 
To me, a blog seemed like the modern day equivalent of the letter you would write in a bid to attract a penpal, desperate to make yourself sound exciting and interesting. The thought made me cringe.
 
But over the past few days, in a bid to get my head around the whole subject of blogs, I've started to read and subscribe to some. In a way it's been a similar experience to my first excursions onto the internet. I found a couple of sites which looked interesting, which lead on to others, which, in turn, lead to a few more and pretty soon I was leaving a breadcrumb trail all over the internet. Sometimes I got lost, sometimes I saw signs I didn't understand, sometimes what was there wasn't worth the trouble it took to seek it out, but every so often, on the myriad of paths, I found a nugget of gold and added it to my favourites.
 
And that's how I've explored until now, as a daily or weekly visitor to familiar spots, relying on them to guide me to new and interesting places. Blogs have opened up a whole new vista and I think I'm beginning to understand their value and potential.
 
So, as a way of learning and understanding more, I'm starting my own blogging exploration. It feels a bit ironic that the subject of my first blog should be blogging itself. It sounds like the start of a joke – what do you call a blog about blogging? Is it an uber blog? Or a meta blog? I have a lot of exploring to do!