A non-blogger friend passed along a story that ran on BBC News earlier this week. The story says December 17th was the 10th anniversary of blogs.
The BBC goes on to say an American who had been a programmer of computer games and educational software first used the term "weblog" to describe what he was doing ten years ago when he posted short essays and links on his web page, which he called "Robot Wisdom." As I was Googling that first blogger by name, I learned that, unfortunately, some of his writings over the years have been strongly anti-Semitic, so I won't glorify him by using his name in this space.
The BBC says that in late 1998 the blogosphere consisted of 23 sites. I guess it was easy to be an A-lister back then.
Once easy-to-use tools came on the scene in 1999, the numbers started to grow. Technorati now tracks more than 70 million blogs, with an estimated 120,000 new blogs coming online every day. New posts are added at the rate of one every 17 seconds, totaling 1.5 million new posts daily, Technorati reports.
That's a lot of words, a lot of thinking and, with comments 
added, an awful lot of conversation. It's also pretty humbling for someone like me who's been at it for less than a year.
So, Happy 10th Anniversary to us. Anyone want to hazard a guess as to what the blogosphere will look like when we celebrate our 20th anniversary?
Hmm, and I thought we were only two or three years old. Well, if the BBC says so, it must be true. Let the celebration begin.
Posted by: Lewis Green | December 23, 2007 at 10:53 AM
"My, how big you've grown!" says me to the number of blogs out there. To escalate from 23 to who knows how many blogs (in whatever language) is no small feat. I've actually seen posts about this weblog story in a few blogs here and there. Even though he is anti-Semitic as you say, it's nice to talk about blog history every now and then.
Posted by: Jay, writer MemberSpeed.com | December 23, 2007 at 12:06 PM
Thanks for stopping by, Jay. To me, as a new blogger, blog history goes back maybe a few years. I'm impressed when I see bloggers like Diva's Toby Bloomberg, who's been doing this for 4 - 5 years. But 10 years? Who knew?
Posted by: David Reich | December 23, 2007 at 12:14 PM
Yeah. I know what you mean. The longest running blog I have is probably just a year old and I'm talking about my personal blog here!
Posted by: Jay, writer MemberSpeed.com | December 23, 2007 at 12:45 PM