Blogs — an ugly word, but now unavoidable — were born with the internet. As soon as people started to use the technology that would link computers, they started leaving messages. In the 1980s, these were “pinned” on virtual “bulletin boards”. Then, in the early 1990s, online diaries appeared, personal journals to be seen by the entire online world. As internet use spread, people were dazzled by their power to connect and communicate. But they didn’t just want to stare at pages. They wanted, above all, to make their mark on the explosively expanding world of cyberspace. So, in the mid-1990s, the online diary became the web log, or blog.

Blogs let you jot down what you think, feel or know and, at the speed of light, publish it to the world. They now cover everything from quantum theory to politics to low-life celebrity gossip and intimate personal confessions. They can be vast publications written by teams of writers, or fragmented jottings from a student pad. They are the most successful, addictive, potent and radical application of all the new technologies and applications spawned by the personal computer.

The total number of blogs is thought to be approaching 200m, 73m of them in China. I can see no reason why there shouldn’t be hundreds of millions more, because, you see, blogging is like smoking or gambling — hard to give up. Ever since I started blogging (March 15, 2006), I’ve been trying to stop. It’s not that it’s time-consuming — I’m a casual blogger. Nor do I feel intimidated by the brutal worldwide abuse from other bloggers that every blogger of any prominence inevitably attracts. I don’t even feel it’s much of a burden: if I don’t want to post, I don’t post, and on a couple of occasions I’ve handed over my blog to others.

No, the reason I keep wanting to quit is the intimacy and exposure of the blogscape. (“Blogosphere” is the name everybody else uses, but I’ve invented my own, slightly better word.) I am, because of my blog, “out there” in a way that, three years ago, I would have found inconceivable, terrifying. I still do. I am also, thanks to Thought Experiments (the title of my blog), exposed to the tribulations of an enormous extended family of commenters, linkers, gypsies, tramps, thieves and, worst of all, intellectuals. Being a nuclear type myself, this is traumatic.

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I sent a guy in LA out to buy a book in the middle of the night; he liked it. Commenters e-mail me their visions and problems. Some flirt, some try to get me to go down the pub, some send me their writing for approval. Chinese people ask me about English usage, Americans ask me if I know Bill Nighy, Australians ask me about the afterlife. Everybody wants to know what I eat and why, inmates of Folsom Prison weep and rage at me because of my loathing of tattoos, Darwinians become entirely irrational in my (virtual) presence. And, a week or two ago, a regular commenter on my blog killed himself.

So the blogscape is not for the faint-hearted. Start blogging and you will initially be lulled into a false sense of security by the ease with which you just knock out a few paragraphs and click Publish Post. At once, there it is, out there for all to see. Remember, I do mean “all”. There’s a shocking disconnect between one fact — you sitting at your computer — and the next — what you just wrote being instantly visible to the entire world. Try to think of it as like stepping out of the toilet to find yourself standing on the centre spot at Wembley on cup-final day.

Yet the disconnect is the point. Blogging, says the supreme blogger and Sunday Times contributor Andrew Sullivan, “is the spontaneous expression of instant thought”. In addition, as Matt Drudge, one of the originators of the form, puts it: “A blog is a broadcast, not a publication.” The true value of blogs is the combination of that initial, unconsidered improvisation, done on the spur of the mood and the moment, and its ensuing broadcast to the largest audience ever created — about 1.5 billion internet users.

There is an important distinction to be made here between wayward solo bloggers, like me, and the more or less “official” blogs that appear on newspaper and magazine sites or on a giant blog aggregator such as Huffington Post. The latter are closer to — often coextensive with — traditional journalism. They tend to involve large staffs and to stick tightly to the news schedule, and they are required to fit into certain categories, usually politics, and not, like me, to wander randomly from technology to metaphysics to politics to the iniquity of all breakfast cereals (except porridge). For these official bloggers, the vertiginous sense of the disconnect between Wembley and the toilet has faded, to be replaced by something like normal publication. It’s the respectable end of the business. It’s blogging, captain, but not as we know it.

So, leaving those official types to one side, what is it that keeps me and all those millions of others blogging? The answer is those very things that make me want to stop — intimacy and exposure. They are, in fact, the same thing. Once you are exposed in this way, intimacy tends to follow. The blogger is able to show important aspects of himself to the world in a way that was hitherto unimaginable. Blogging is a novel form of being.

Yet from the most intimate to the most functional, the important thing about blogs is connection. This is what lies at the heart of the intimacy/exposure nexus. It takes time to get the hang of this. The way to get your blog going is to use connectivity. Link to other blogs and place comments. They’ll come back to you. Once they do, a few will stay. You will acquire regulars. You’ll get to know them. If they stay away for a while, you’ll miss them. You’ll feel, if you’re a sucker like me, somehow responsible for and to them. This is weird, I know, but then good things start to happen. I reviewed a couple of books for the Philadelphia Inquirer. One was a collection of John Ashbery’s poems. This resulted in my resuming my own connection with that great artist. Connections pile upon connections.

I inspired two commenters to start their own blogs — the physicist Gordon McCabe (mccabism.blogspot.com) and the ineffable Nige (nigeness.blogspot.com). In finest familial style, the former turned on me rather savagely over Darwinism. I was at one with King Lear: “How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is / To have a thankless child!” One discovers unexpected soul mates. I found Patrick Kurp via a mutual love of the novelist Ford Madox Ford. And then — very naughty, this — I arranged a few small raids on Jeffrey Archer’s blog (jeffreyarchers.blogspot.com). My commenters went over there and posted comments saying how great he was. Sorry, Jeff, it’s my child within.

Throughout, I was accumulating this faithful band of commenters, most of them bloggers themselves. I would name a few, but those I missed out would get all tetchy, so I’d better not. The striking thing about this little community is how, over time, we got to know each other in surprising detail. We trend, bend and blend together. I can do irony on the blog in ways I would never get away with in this organ, and I can assume quite a high level of knowledge. This latter is hugely helped by the world-changing technology of the hyperlink — I don’t have to quote an article, I can just link to it. We are, thus, all instantly informed about the same things.