The Blog : A Phenonmenon

In the internet era, its uncommon to hear of anyone who hasn't heard of blogging or owns a blog. Blogging has become one of the popular justifications for the Internet apart from social networking or online gaming. It is a growing trend that transcends age, gender, race or even language. To most, blogging is the equivalent of an online journal; to some it’s a portal of expression of one’s interest and gathering a small community that shares the same interest or passion of that particular topic. So it forms little niches of interest based online community.

Birth of 'Weblogs'

Apparently, John Barger coined the term ‘Weblog’ in 1997(Wiki). It is mainly to describe online diaries which was later popularized by Evan Williams of Pyra Labs who further devised the word to “blog” and “blogger”. It has been a decade and the blogging fever has not left the building. Blogs are very easy to set up, all you need is an email address and an internet connection. The accessibility and total control of the blog by the author makes weblog a appealing to the masses. The author can edit, delete or create any post at any time they want.

Did you know that Bruce Ableson set up the first blog community, Open Diary, in 1998 and since then, there were a few other blogging host that launched similar sites such as LiveJournal and Blogger.com..

To date there are a total of 126,861,574 blogs online which covers a plethora of topics from politics, health, art even to the bizarre and taboos.

References:

BlogPulse (2009), 'BlogPulse STATS', viewed December 16, 2009, from http://www.blogpulse.com/

Blog. (2009, December 16). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 03:27, December 16, 2009, from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Blog&oldid=345279945