The Blogosphere - History and Statistics - How To Blog Series
Sunday, June 10, 2007
When you stop and think about it, blogging is just the next, logical level in the continuing evolution of the Internet. It's also what makes the Internet so powerful - the ability to instantly connect with others, obtain and share information. Before blogging became popular, communities took form in many other ways on the web: bulletin board systems, forums, usenet, newsgroups. The first true blogging communities were online diaries which became popular in the late 1990's with sites like Open Diary and Live Journal. People would comment on their daily lives, experiences, rants, raves, post poetry, comment on anything and everything.
Technorati has been tracking the blogoshpere for 4 years. The popularity and phenomenon of blogs can be seen in the staggering growth. Blogs have gone from personal, online journals and diaries to platforms for political candidates, entertainers, citizen journalists, to more recently, an avenue for businesses to connect with their customers and market their products and services.
The Stats
- Technorati launched in Nov 2002 – just under 13,000 blogs
- Nov 2005 – tracking 20 million blogs
- November 2006, Technorati was tracking nearly 60 million blogs
- In 2006, estimated 80,000 blogs created worldwide every day
- As of April 2007 that number has risen to 120,000 blogs created daily
- For the latest detailed stats from Technorati see The State of the Live Web, April 2007
Here's an excerpt from the Wikipedia page on blog history:
"The term "weblog" was coined by Jorn Barger on 17 December 1997. The short form, "blog," was coined by Peter Merholz, who jokingly broke the word weblog into the phrase we blog in the sidebar of his blog Peterme.com in April or May of 1999. This was quickly adopted as both a noun and verb ("to blog," meaning "to edit one's weblog or to post to one's weblog").
After a slow start, blogging rapidly gained in popularity: the site Xanga, launched in 1996, had only 100 diaries by 1997, but over 20 million as of December 2005. Blog usage spread during 1999 and the years following, being further popularized by the near-simultaneous arrival of the first hosted blog tools."
One of the first free blogging platforms was Blogger from Pyra Labs, which Google acquired in 2003. There are numerous free and fee-based blogging platforms out now - AOL, Yahoo and MSN all have their versions. But along with Blogger, both Wordpress and Typepad seem to be the most popular blog communities. For business blogs - I recommend using either Wordpress, Typepad or Blogger.
A recent addition to the blog community is Vox from Sixapart - which owns Typepad (I use Tyepad for this blog) and LiveJournal. Vox is a combination of a blog platform for newbies and a social network - on par with Yahoo, MSN, and AOL blog communities.
Next in the Series: Types of Blogs
Visit my page on "How To Blog" for a list of all posts.
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