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Blog

Updated : Wednesday 30 November 2011

This is a personal journal broadcast on the internet. The term originally used was Web Log (or Weblog), like a ship’s log kept by the captain. By extension, a log became a personal journal, and a Weblog a personal journal broadcast on the internet. In 1999, a web designer, Peter Merholz, was the first to shift from Weblog to “We blog” and thence to “Blog”, which was shorter and above all less politically correct if not subversive (onomatopoeically, it suggested the vomiting of information). The word was quickly adopted and institutionalised by Blogger (one of the first blogging platforms) (1). Over 162 million blogs had been counted worldwide by May 2011 according to BlogPulse, and the number of people reading them is increasing. One French source put that increase at 28% per year in January 2011, with 12 million people in France alone connecting to a blog every day and three quarters of them every month. Reliable statistics for other countries are hard to find, however.

(1): For more on the origins of the blog, see the excellent work by Scott Rosenberg, Say Everything.

If you’re young, a blog is a way of keeping a private diary that everyone can read, recording what you are doing, whom you’re seeing and what you’re thinking. But the blog is no longer the prerogative just of geeks and the very young. It’s a good way of promoting your work, an artistic or charitable project, or just your opinions. You can use it to draw attention to your projects and gather support, provided people can find you online, given that in France alone there are around 10 million blogs, of which 1.5 million are active (in other words regularly updated). For others (a minority, clearly!) who have nothing much to “promote”, a blog lets them satisfy their insatiable ego and fool themselves that they are capable of influencing opinion, along the lines of the opinion leaders in the traditional media. But they shouldn’t get carried away: 80% of visits to blogs last less than 10 seconds! Most internauts apparently just read the titles of the posts on the RSS feeds, which is why advertisers tend to be disappointed by the low level of return on their investments in blog communications. They need to be patient: as the blogosphere reaches maturity, some bloggers are already marking themselves out as opinion leaders exactly as in the traditional media (see influencers).