Blogging - Then and Now

The ever-present and highly influential Google has indexed well over 8 billion pages of information on the world wide web. This vast number of pages available for viewing posed a selection problem for the reader: how on earth do you choose which pages are most useful, and which are not? How do you decide which sites are interesting or entertaining, and which ones aren't?

The answer to that question came in the form of the original blogs, or weblogs. The first weblogs were logs of web pages that an author or editor found interesting. The early bloggers understood that there was a need for someone to preview and evaluate all the stuff that was being published on the web, so weblogs became a way of separating the wheat from the chaff, or setting sites of good quality apart from those that were simply mediocre-or just plain bad.

By 1999, a number of highly important webtools meant that blogging was accessible to the general public. The appearance of Pitas and Blogger led to a massive increase in the number of blogs in the blogosphere, because setting up and maintaining a blog had become as simple as typing text into a box and hitting the Enter key.

Weblogs have changed considerably over the years; instead of simply being just a filter for other websites or a tool of evaluation of site quality, they are also used in many more ways, by individuals with particular interests, by professionals, and also by commercial groups of various sizes. They are used by journalists, for example, to analyse or provide further commentary or analysis of mainstream news stories, but they are also used by many individuals who simply want to share their interest with the world.

One very interesting feature of many present-day blogs is monetization, in other words the use of blogs to generate revenue for an individual or a group. This may not be of interest to those who simply wish to share a hobby or a set of views, but for some business-minded individuals and for many companies who seek to make money from net-based activities, writing a blog is an absolute must.

Michael Robinson writes for The Starcruiser Blog and is the owner of startmakingonlineprofit.com. He also trades on eBay, under the username of starcruiser5.