The Blogger Boom
A quick glance at the internet these days will leave you with the
distinct impression that blogs -- formerly known as weblogs and online journals --
are breeding like bunnies! To use a familiar colloquialism,
everyone and his uncle have a blog or two. A statistical
overview of blogging tells us that there are more than fifty million
blogs online, a number that doubles every six and a half months. Technorati,
a popular tag-tracking software, publicized its most recent report on
the "state
of the blogosphere" in 2006, releasing the statistics cited
above. However, not all blogs rely on Technorati for tag
tracking purposes, which means there are potentially hundreds of
thousands of blogs not yet counted by their surveys. All in
all, the concept of blogging and the number of people who actively keep
online journals, diaries, and similar sites is growing exponentially.
What is a blog? A blog, weblog, or online diary/journal is a website that contains regular entries reflecting the site owner's personal life, interests, or specialized information that he or she has to offer. The average person blogs about his or her life, but many bloggers create sites specific to their hobbies, careers, and educational pursuits. There are blogs about parenting, knitting, cooking, celebrities, product reviews, activism, politics, finance, sports, and just about everything else a person could think of to document online. Blogs can be hosted on their own domains, using special software that allows users to create entries and post them online in reverse chronological order. Blogs can also be hosted on free websites like Blogger, Word Press, and Vox. Many services like Bravenet and MySpace include a blog as part of the entire package users receive when signing up. Other services offer banner advertising networks for bloggers to place banner ads on their blogs to earn income from their websites.
How did the blog come about? Though the average college student may be hard pressed to name a single, non-blogging peer in 2007, blogs are a relatively new phenomenon. Some trace their history back to the paper diaries that have long been maintained by writers and other individuals since man learned how to communicate with paper and pen. Others say that their more recent history can be ascribed to the earliest interactive bulletin boards, which predate the internet as we know it by several years. The first bloggers used traditional html to build their journals, updating them manually with new posts whenever they wrote them. According to Rebecca Blood, author of The Weblog Handbook: Practical Advice on Creating and Maintaining Your Blog, the first dedicated blogging software was released in 1999 by Pitas.com, giving more people the ability to blog without understanding html coding. One month later, Pyra introduced what is currently the most popular weblog site online: Blogger.com. Thus began the blogger boom we know today.
Why blog? This last question has nearly as many answers as there are bloggers to answer it. Individuals gain different things from their blogs. Many use them as a creative outlet, showcasing their writing, photography, and other artistic talents. Others use their online journals to connect and make friends with people who can relate to their lives and experiences. Some people use their blogs as a way to stay in touch with far away family and friends, updating them with reports and photographs from their daily lives. Still others make money blogging by providing advertising space to companies who sell products and services related to the blog's content. Internet advertising has exploded over the past year, naturally evolving from the popularity of blogging itself.
Whether blogging for fun, for profit, or to share a special skill or set of knowledge, the advent of blogging has revolutionized the way the internet generation seeks out information and community!