Elaine O’Connor
Sun
“Some of these sites are getting tremendous readership,” says Brian Lamb of UBC’s Office of Learning Technology. Photograph by : Jon Murray, The Province
Thinking of ways to keep your New Year’s resolutions alive? Publishing your progress online to be scrutinized by strangers can prove more than motivating.
Online weblog diaries, or blogs, have been hailed “the home pages of the 21st century” by tech pundits, who point to their spectacular growth as proof of public demand for interactive computing. Internet users of all ages and interests are discovering the power of blogging for personal project management.
Trying to lose weight? The Skinny Daily Post (www.skinnydaily.com) can offer support.
Quitting smoking? Take inspiration from 42-year-old American working mom Tammy (http://tammysquitsmokingblog.
blogspot.com). Just want to shake up your life? The catch-all resolution blog 43 Things and sister site 43 Places have thousands of users checking off goals or trips and inspiring others to do the same (www.43things.com and www.43places.com).
Blogging is no longer just for techies or teenagers, says veteran blogger and “social software” expert Brian Lamb of UBC’s Office of Learning Technology.
Lamb’s been blogging for five years — he runs his current blog Abject Learning (at http://weblogs.elearning.ubc.ca/brian/) — and helps organize Northern Voice, a national blogging conference held in Vancouver Feb. 10 and 11 (www.northernvoice.ca).
In the last year or so, Lamb and other early adopters have noticed blogging explode among the masses: hobbyists launching craft, travel, food, parenting and new job blogs.
“People start a new process and they think, ‘I need to capture this,'” says the emerging technologies co-ordinator. “They do the project, they talk about the process and put up a photo or two about what came out of it. Some of these sites are getting tremendous readership.”
Everywhere you surf, the blogosphere is booming.
Blog-tracker newspaper The Blog Herald’s February 2006 Blog Count estimates there may be more than 185 million blogs online, based on the latest international hosting stats.
A January 2005 Pew/American Life Project survey found 27 per cent of U.S. residents online have read a blog: and blog readership grew almost 60 per cent, by 32 million new viewers in 2004 from the year before.
Veteran blog trackers Technorati claim about 70,000 new blogs are created every day, according to their 2004 State of the Blogosphere report. The search engine site monitors 27 million blogs worldwide, with 700,000 posts daily and 29,100 updates an hour.
In Canada, Blogs Canada lists more than 10,000 True North blogs, with an average of 150 new ones added every week. The LiveJournal blog service reports 300,000 Canadian users among the nine million bloggers it serves around the globe.
The growth in blogging among the general public is due in part to software that is increasingly easy to use.
“If someone can sign up for a Yahoo! or a Hotmail e-mail account and successfully send an e-mail, I don’t see any reason they couldn’t go to Blogger.com and go through the same process,” Lamb says.
And as blogging grows, the e-learning expert predicts, “We’re probably not too far away [from the time] where having some kind of blogging presence is just like having e-mail.”
BLOG THIS!
Many blog software sites offer free blogging tools (paid accounts get fancier features). To get started check out:
LiveJournal: www.livejournal.com
Blogger: www.blogger.com
Xanga: www.xanga.com
MSN Spaces: http://spaces.msn.com
AOL Journals: http://hometown.aol.com
WordPress: http://wordpress.com
Moveable Type: www.sixapart.com/moveabletype
Flickr: Basic photo-blogging at www.flickr.com
A directory of wonderful blogs
Blogs Canada: www.blogscanada.com
Technorati: www.technorati.com
Google Blogs Search: www.google.ca/blogsearch
THE LATEST BLOGSPEAK: A DICTIONARY
Vlogging: video-blogging; blogs updated with video feed
Moblogs: mobile-blogs; blogs updated with camera phone pictures and text
Audioblogging/ Podcasting: creating music or speech-based online broadcasts
Blogosphere: the community of blogs
Blogroll: a sidebar of blog links on a site
Blawg: a law or legal issues blog
Bleg: used to ask for information or money
Blogathy: what a blogger who is apathetic about posting feels
Blogeratti: the blogosphere intelligentsia
Blogopotamus: a huge blog entry
Blurker: someone who reads blogs but never leaves any comments
Hitnosis: being unable to stop checking the number of visitors on your hit counter
Splog: fake spam-blog with links to sites affiliated with the blogger, intended to boost hits
Podcatching: checking for new programs on a podcasting feed
Vodcasting: podcasting video content
Wiki: an interactive blog anyone can post to
© The Vancouver Province 2006