I began writing regularly during my second year of Sixth Form. By today's standards, 17¾ is quite a late age to start. With a blossoming blog culture, anyone who has an interest nowadays invariably writes about it. I know friends from my year at school who had kept online diaries right from their early teens, but these tended to be girls who started with Dear Diary, wrote in the sort of garish pink you had to highlight in order to read and who had no designs on a wide readership. And while some of us had just discovered Bebo, which had been the early triangle ding of the social networking boom of Facebook and Twitter that would soon follow, we didn't know the capabilities of the Internet as we do now. Back then, it was enough to be popular within your small clique. But suddenly, popularity wasn't enough; people wanted to be famous. Going back a bit further, I guess it was MSN Messenger that first got me into writing. Everyone st...