Researchers working on the American Life Project found that the popularity of blogs today in terms of readerships in the United States was absolutely exploding; however, they also found that the amount of blogs available was increasing slowly in comparison. In the last six months of 2004, for instance, blog readers grew from a mere 17% of the population to a robust 37%–a significant increase. However, blog writers only increased from 5% and 7%; and largely maintained their homogeneous composition, which is predominantly male, young, and wealthy. The ALP attributed this explosion in readerships to the Presidential race, where both candidates employed blogging in some form to attract campaign donors.

The Guardian, which performed their study more recently, also found similar results in the United Kingdom on the popularity of blogs today. While they also found that readerships had increased dramatically, they did not find the same issue of slow blog growth; however, they did find out that a fairly astonishing 30% of frequent Internet users had never even heard of a blog.

So in which direction is the popularity of blogs today moving?–To greater profusion or to obscurity?

Given that blogs are the best intermediary between websites and forums, it is hard to imagine that they will decrease in the popularity of blogs today; conversely, however, it isn’t hard to imagine that they will improve significantly in continuation with how they have changed since their inception in the mid-1990s.

In the short term, it is fairly safe to imagine that larger blogs will experiment with video technology while older blogs stick with easy, faster-loading models. It is also fairly safe to image that blog indexing methods will continue to improve and may even break away from the traditional algorithm method.

For instance, while some bloggers focus on general topics, such as cars, other bloggers narrow the scope of their blogs even further to sub-topics, such as luxury cars or antique cars. From an optimization standpoint, a blog with a narrower scope would likely outperform a blog with a broader scope in terms of conversions or clicks-per-visitor. So, if your goal is to make money, the types of blogs you can build are somewhat limited.

In terms of actual topics for the types of blogs you can build, there are about 9 major areas that are popular for current blogs: business, culture, community, politics, religion, science, travel, online diaries, and gossip. Most blog directories use similar topical categories to order blogs.

In addition to the topic for the types of blogs you can build, you will also want to consider the program used to generate it. This is another way that directories categorize blogs. For instance, blogs can fall under the category of the tool or software that was used to create them. Some blogs are created using Google’s Blogger. These blogs are often lumped together in directories as the same “type” of blog. They actually have an auto-surfing system that allows you to jump randomly from one Blogger blog to the another.

Other types of blogs you can build include social networking blogs, which allow members of the same network to interact with each other using various blog functions. Two examples are Livejournal–which was one of the original social networking blog systems–and Myspace, which is currently the largest, boasting a base of around 80,000,000 users. In recent months, marketers and business persons have begun using Myspace to introduce their product to potential customers.

Another type of blog you can build is a video blog or “vlog.” These usually contain videos and allow other posts to attach media in comments.

The last types of blogs you can build are geographical blogs. With such a robust blogging atmosphere–with users weighing in from all over the globe–directories, such as Blog Wise will allow users to search for blogs by geographic location. If you believe you have some information you can contribute about your specific region, you may want to start a regional geographic blog.

With the recent rise in social networking sites, ie. myspace, facebook, etc. and the subsequent attention they have received from main stream media, people commonly perceive weblogs as some sort of a new invention. Adding information to web-logs or ‘blogs’ has been around for over ten years and has gradually gained strength on the Internet as means of communication.

While people blogging in the early 1990s generally limited their blogs to personal information, such as chronicles and diaries, bloggers today write about a wide variety of different topics, from politics to cheese tasting. The core idea behind blogging has never changed though, it’s always been a simple means to better facilitate communication.

Blogging is one of the most effective means of Internet-based communication because it is relatively easy and requires little time investment at the base level. Using a blogging interface like Wordpress, a blog owner can add a new entries to his blog while he sits in a meeting at work or watches TV, in fact that’s how I tend to write most of my articles.

Another crucial aspect of blogging that makes it such an effective medium for communication is that it allows for rapid-response comments. A political debate could literally unfold over the course of the afternoon in the form of comments on a blog.

Blogging can often be controversial, with lively political debate, or the age old Mac vs Windows debate, but it doesn’t have to be that way. Many blogs are used to simply say ‘hi’ to friends who are also blog owners. This is quite common with social networking sites, such as myspace and facebook, both of which use a form of blog for communication between site ‘friends’.

Whether blogging is a form spurring debate between political opponents or blogging is a means of increasing bonds between friends, they have the ability to rapidly increase the speed of communication between people across wide distances, particularly when you’ve got your RSS feeds working for you but we’ll discuss that later on.

For now, start thinking about what you would like to blog about and we’ll see what we can build together.

Cheers

Matt