Considerations When Writing for the Web – Engaging a new type of Audience

The rise of the Blog is a recent phenomenon, with Jorn Barger coining the term “weblog” on Dec 17th, 1997 to describe his collection of links logged from the internet. This was further cropped to the term “blog” and in the 12 years since the first blog was published, the blog phenomenon has mutated from a geek niche to a world-dominating online publishing medium (Wortham, 2007). Some one hundred and thirty three million (133,000,000) blogs have been indexed by Technorati since 2002 (McLean, 2009), however there is uncertainty regarding the actual number of real active blogs online; how many of these are maintained regularly and how many were just sporadic flights of fancy for the online hobbyist? According to research conducted by Technorati in 2009 (McLean, 2009), four distinct sub-groups of bloggers exist: