My First Look at Blogging: Reflecting on Rebecca Blood

I have heard a lot about blogs and blogging, but I have really never participated in or read blogs. So I guess you could consider me as a blog virgin. With that said, reading the Rebecca Blood Blog really opened my eyes to the history and growth of webblogs. I found it kind of interesting that within the last 12 years blogging really exploded. There were only a handful of blogs in 1998 and only around 23 in early 1999 before blogging began its uprising. It was interesting to see how blogging began to catch on, how blogging has evolved, and the different types of blogs that there are today.

But above all, there was one statement that really caught my attention. There is no sense in rewording it, because she couldn’t have said it any better. To quote Rebecca Blood in "Weblogs: A History and Perspective":

“The promise of the web was that everyone could publish, that a thousand voices could flourish, communicate, connect. The truth was that only those people who knew how to code a web page could make their voices heard. Blogger, Pitas, and all the rest have given people with little or no knowledge of HTML the ability to publish on the web: to pontificate, remember, dream, and argue in public, as easily as they send an instant message.”

I was never really big on the whole blogging thing because I guess I really just didn’t know that much about it. But now I can see why it caught on. A blog is a way for anyone to share their opinion, find others that share the same interests, or maybe just rant about something that aggravated them that day. Whatever your reason for blogging, it’s an opportunity to be heard, an opportunity to reach out.

After reading Rebecca Blood’s blog (which I consider to be my introduction to blogging altogether), I decided to do a little browsing to see how blogging has grown today, and I came across a website blog called The Future Buzz, and I found a section on web stats from a little over a year ago, posted by Adam Singer on January 12, 2009. The site has all types of different stats on it from FaceBook to YouTube to Google (here’s the link if you want to browse around http://thefuturebuzz.com/2009/01/12/social-media-web-20-internet-numbers-stats/), but the one that I wanted to see was the section on blogs. The stats he posted are as follows:

Blogosphere stats

· 133,000,000 – number of blogs indexed by Technorati since 2002

· 346,000,000 – number of people globally who read blogs (comScore March 2008)

· 900,000 – average number of blog posts in a 24 hour period

· 1,750,000 – number of RSS subscribers to TechCrunch, the most popular Technology blog (January 2009)

· 77% - percentage of active Internet users who read blogs

· 81 - number of languages represented in the blogosphere

· 59% – percentage of bloggers who have been blogging for at least 2 years

source

So how many blogs are there worldwide? I leave you with this. According to <http://blogs.forbes.com/digitalrules/2005/12/terrifying-internet-facts/>, as of the beginning of 2010 the estimated number of blogs worldwide is nearing 1 billion.