10th Anniversary of Blogging

There was a short piece this morning on NPR radio celebrating the 10th anniversary of blogging. The series will continue all week. Ten years ago the term weblog was first coined, which was shortened into blog. It is estimated that there are now about 100 million active blogs, with another 100,000 added per day. There are also an estimated 200 million blogs that have been started and abandoned by users that experimented with them for a while.

This is an excellent example of the increased rate of change now happening. Ten years ago people only a very small portion of people knew what the term blog meant. In one short decade it has become a pervasive aspect of our society, along with its other variations of user generated content sites. Who could have predicted the arrival of MySpace, FaceBook, or Youtube ten years ago? Or that the US Senate would change hands because of a Macaca moment?

It's very hard to predict what the next ten years will bring in this area, since the rate of change keeps increasing. Two thoughts on its general characteristics though:

1) There will be more personal information being made available by people on the web. This will not trigger the fear of loss of privacy that you might expect, because it will be information that is controlled by the individual.

2) There will be a growth in the ability to establish one's reputation, or check on people's reputation. This is an absolutely vital part of the functioning of humankind's off-line society, and is desperately needed as part of the on-line society in order to sort through the unlimited amount of content available on the web.

By the way, the most popular blog in the world? It is run by Xu Jinglei in China according to a Wikipedia entry. Yet another sign of the times.