Dispatches from Blogistan: A Travel Guide for the Modern Blogger

1. Blogs Explode onto the Scene

There’s no easy definition for the word blog. The Merriam-Webster dictionary, which named the neologism its Word of the Year in 2004, defines the term as an online personal journal that houses reflections, comments, and hyperlinks. It’s a tidy definition, and true enough, but it doesn’t really capture the fervor and breadth and flux of the phenomenon.

The numbers are boggling. The word blog wasn’t coined until 1999, and yet by late summer 2006, blog search engine Technorati (technorati.com) was reporting nearly fifty million blogs worldwide, with an average of one new blog launching every second, and more than a million new posts being uploaded each day. Over the course of the previous three years, the number of ...