Datasheet

17
Chapter 1: Discovering Blog Basics
Figure 1-5:
Real
Baking with
Rose Levy
Beranbaum
is a spon-
sored blog
written by
a cookbook
author.
Courtesy of Rose Levy Beranbaum, author of The Cake Bible (William Morrow).
Blogging through the ages
The concept behind a blog isn’t new; after all,
people have been keeping diaries and journals
since the invention of the written word. Even on
the Web, diary Web sites existed long before
anyone used the word blog.
No one really knows when the first true blog
was created, but estimates put the date around
1994. The term weblog came into existence in
1997, and it was quickly shortened to the more
colloquial blog. If you want to read more about
the history of blogging, read author Rebecca
Blood’s essay on the early days of blogging
at www.rebeccablood.net/essays/
weblog_history.html.
No one can really measure the number of blogs
in the world, for a number of technical reasons
and because blogs can be short-lived (acciden-
tally or deliberately), but all studies of numbers
indicate that the number of blogs increases
dramatically every month. For example, in May
2007, the blog search engine Technorati (www.
technorati.com) was tracking 75 million
blogs; by July 2007, that number was up to 94
million.
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