After a year or two as a dedicated denizen of the blogosphere, it’s easy to forget how baffling it all was in the beginning.

Cast your mind back to those first tentative steps into the magical realm of Blogspot, where everything was inexplicably free and you could do almost anything you liked. Er, except that you couldn’t, because you didn’t know how to.

Remember the questions? How do you get pictures in posts? How do people get things into the sidebar and space them out neatly? What in tarnation is RSS? Why do I need a “feed” when I’ve just had lunch?

It all seemed so hopeless then.

Of course, those of us who stuck with it, absorbed all this stuff by a mysterious process of osmosis and trial and error. Amazingly, there were no books to refer to in those days, just totally inadequate FAQs and incomprehensible “explanations” written by geeky engineers.

So try to imagine your average bod arriving at a typical Web 2.0 bloggy website calling itself a “social network”. The culture shock and sense of alienation must be absolute. Even I reel at the thought of the learning curves needed to access sites like Lulu and De.licio.us (does anyone realize that’s a complete URL?).

So I was delighted to come across a post by Stephen Baker over at BusinessWeek’s Blogspotting, called Web 3.0. It’s all about cracking open Web 2.0, he opines, under three points. Here’s one of them :

Only a fraction of humanity has anything to do with Web 2.0. Others stay to the sidelines because they find the technology too confusing or expensive, or they don’t see the relevance. Bring another billion or so people into Web 2.0, and Metcalfe’s Law alone will make it a radically different phenomenon.

Those of us who are already working on taming the wilder outreaches of Web 2.0 by, for example, converting blog networks into various Network Magazines (you knew I’d get to it in the end), are, by Baker’s definition, working in Web 3.0.

How old bowler Web 2.0 now seems.

All this is by way of introducing our third Network Magazine, now in the planning stages, 21st-century Phi, which will cover science and technologies, including modern ones like ecology and parapsychology.

All so very Web 3.1.

Politicos in the Westminster Village are probably laughing themselves silly with the news that Hurricane Gordon is set to hit the British Isles.

What’s funny? Only Scotland will be affected *.

Is this a mystic sign of things to come? You couldn’t make it up.

* Gordon Brown, a Scot with a Scottish Constituency, wants to be Prime Minister of England.

For our first Saturday treat we have a real corker. It’s Roger Scruton’s piece in today’s Times (London) about the need for conservation in politics. As a life-long Burkean, this article says it all for me :

Caring for one’s country – a naturally green aim for a conservative party

Roger Scruton’s new book, A Political Philosophy, has just been published by Continuum.