The world of blogging shows no signs of slowing, according to Technorati, the blog search engine who recently announced that they are now tracking over 70 million blogs worldwide - approximately 13 million more than the number detected by the last Technorati report in November 2006.Blogs have become a vital part of the way we obtain information and can take many forms, from photo journals of travels in exotic countries, political debates, the latest technology and sport, to extremely obscure and unusual topics. If it exists, the chances are somebody somewhere is probably blogging about it.
Bloggers who write well and build a following can reap financial benefits, and established and respected blogs tend to be trusted more than magazine editorials or official websites, who generally have a vested interest in promoting a product. Bloggers tend to be more honest and open with their opinions, as they usually have less call to keep advertisers happy. What's more, blogs also allow readers to add comments, thus creating the interactivity that readers in the age of Web 2.0 have come to expect.
But it's not all plain sailing; spam blogs, known as "Splogs" are a problem for the blogosphere. These are automated blogs that contain little or no unique content and instead use content lifted from an RSS feed, which is then republished with a link. These are of no real value to human readers and exist largely for black hat search engine optimisation, yet can often rank highly in search engine results positions (SERPs).
And it's not just the West's internet users that are getting in on the blogging action. In fact, according to Technorati, Japanese is now the most common language of the blogger, accounting for 37 per cent of all blogs. This is narrowly followed by English with 36 per cent, then Chinese with eight per cent, Italian (which recently overtook Spanish) with a three per cent share, and a newcomer to the top ten - the Iranian language of Farsi - accounting for one per cent of the blogosphere's lingo.
The web, and blogs in particular, have been a great liberator in the media, allowing anyone to have their say and distributing power from the hands of traditional media moguls to anybody with web access. This has changed the way we get our news and the general public have benefited greatly from the increased number of information sources. This is particularly apparent in periods of violent conflict, when bloggers inside war zones report on the situation behind the lines of warfare.
It looks like the blogging boom is set to continue its expansion in the World Wide Web and, in addition to sites which exist purely as blogs, many companies are tapping into this form of social media by building blog sections into their websites. This gives users extra information, helps create a more personal tone and, overall, adds interactivity for surfers, increasing the likely hood of repeat visits.
