Why am I here?

"Perhaps you could start your own blog" my old friend suggested, when I was drawn by the lure of The Festival of the Trees, "even if only to post about trees once a month." I was and am still not certain that my life or writing skills stand up to even this very modest form of self-publicisation - unaccustomed as I am to public speaking - but, here I am, and immediately I find myself overcome with shyness and self-consciousness. Just who am I doing this for? For myself or others, for people who know me or people who don't? Why am I exposing myself like this, what if someone should read it? Or worse still, what if no one does?
On reflection I've decided I shall embark on this on the assumption that no one is actually reading it - after all, it seems to me that soon everyone will be writing blogs and no one will actually have the time to read them. I'm going cheerfully to sing my own song, out loud, for all the world to hear, safe in the likelihood that nobody's listening.
My initial trepidation comes in part from ineptitude and unfamiliarity. Less than a couple of years ago, our household was a self-styled oasis of digital-free quietism, sans computer, sans mobile phone, sans digital camera, sans everything. The DVD player was the first that ever burst, then my husband fretted once too often that I might have absconded with the dog ( my absence would possibly be supportable, but not Molly's ), and we succumbed to the mobile 'phones. Less than a year ago we were still without the computer, the camera was acquired this summer, and precipitated something of a turning point in my relationship with the digital world, because I rapidly fell in love with it and its possibilities.
I have only started to look at blogs in the last month or so, and in doing so I've discovered some real treasures, staggeringly talented people with deeply interesting inner and outer lives, and one or two who are, unfortunately, not as interesting as they think they are, tiresome and narcissistic wastes of cyberspace even. I can't hope to join the former group, and can only hope not to join the latter! But here I am anyway, at a good enough place to start.