Media News - Tuesday, December 18, 2007

Weblogs rack up a decade of posts

The word ‘weblog’ on Monday celebrated the 10th anniversary of it being coined on 17 December 1997. The word was created by Jorn Barger to describe what he was doing with his pioneering Robot Wisdom web page. The word was an abbreviation for the ‘logging’ of interesting ‘web’ sites that Mr Barger featured on his regularly updated journal. A decade on and blog-watching firm Technorati reports it is tracking more than 70 million web logs. While many people maintained regular journals or diaries before the word was coined, 1997 marked the point when they started to become a particular online pursuit. For some time after Mr Barger coined the term, the numbers of people who could be said to be actually writing one was small. Official numbers are hard to find but some estimate that the size of the blogosphere in late 1998 encompassed only 23 sites. In 1999 the phenomenon took off as easy to use tools started to appear which made it much easier to write and maintain these sorts of websites. Also in 1999 the word ‘blog’ was coined as a shortened form of the original term. Technorati estimates that there are now 120,000 new blogs being created every day. Posts are being added to blogs at a rate of 17 per second - a total of 1.5 million per day, says the firm. (BBC News)

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