The Blogging Diaries - Part 2
After SpiroGate, the disgraced radio presenter that I was decided to lay low for a while. I’d been burnt by Google, foolishly forgetting that when I was writing to my friends, it was accessible to the whole world.
However, the scandal had coincided with a rich vein of blogging, and I wasn’t prepared to give it up all together. I decided to take my blogging underground, with a covert operation: a password-protected site. Would I become the secret voice of the disillusioned masses rising up against the Big Brother state? Well, I’ll let you be the judge of that, when I tell you the blog was hosted at Diaryland.com. Still, I certainly gave C4’s Big Brother a sufficient dressing down.
The password protection was a stupid idea. The essence of a blog is that it’s in the public domain and as a result the comments were suffering. After my paranoia had settled, I unlocked the door.
Spirojunk.Diaryland was my self-indulgent phase, with almost every post 10 times longer than it needed to be. I was taking the advice of George Orwell, defecating all over it and then writing an unnecessarily long account of the entire incident. (Have you ever seen that metaphor in print, George? You pedantic c-…Oh, not barbarous. Damn.)
In fact, reading back over them now, I’m struggling to find any to link to, every tortured “joke” and ill-informed opinion makes me loathe my former self. Back then I was wondering why my friends weren’t reading or commenting on my blog anymore, now it’s painfully obvious.
As I got into my final year of Uni, SpiroJunk.Diaryland started to dry up. I had started my Famous Jon documentary project, which was me trying to make myself famous for nothing, for a documentary film. The project was a mild success with remnants of my 15 minutes still found in the dark corners of the Internet such as here, here and here. At the time I set up a Wordpress blog for the campaign, which has since died but can be seen in the Internet archives.
After Uni I was unemployed and with no chance of getting a job in TV. But, blogging started to send me in a different direction…
