Anyone can write a blog, but will anyone read it?

It’s easy to tell when an idea or a thing has made the jump from fad to standard – it becomes a verb. For instance, a fax, short for facsimile, became faxing. The same thing has happened to blogging, a word now heard so often that it seems as though everyone is doing it – that everyone has a blog and is blogging.

In the past few years, blogging has become, next to e-mail and instant messaging, a common way for people to spend countless hours on the Internet. And why not? A Web log (which quickly became "weblog" and finally "blog") is an online continuation of the desktop publishing phenomena that started in the 1980s and changed forever the hierarchy of the information flow. (Suddenly, you didn’t need a printing press to say what was on your mind.)

By Tom Regan

Full Story: http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/1123/p16s01-stct.html?s=hns