ABC News calls them the People of the Year and, according to statistics, a new one makes an appearance every 7? seconds. Who are they? They are the bloggers.
I will be the first to admit I find the blogging phenomenon a bit hard to fathom. Face it: this is diary writing with a spin. It is journal keeping with good marketing hype.
It seems I am not the only person curious about the concept. Last year, the word blog was the No1 term looked up on the Merriam-Webster.com website. People everywhere seem to be either trying their hand at blogging or trying to figure out why anyone would bother.
Let us define the term blog, courtesy of Merriam Webster: the noun blog is short for Weblog. A website that contains an online personal journal with reflections, comments and often hyperlinks provided by the writer - in other words, a glorified electronic diary.
I suspect that, like most diaries, many blogs are not worth the time it takes to read them - at least for anyone other than the author. After all, you may have access to a computer and an internet connection, but that does not automatically mean you have anything interesting to say.
A search of the blogosphere (a word that undoubtedly will appear in Merriam-Webster's 2005 Word of the Year list) will turn up a baffling array of fan sites, personal rants, pictures of pets and a variety of other things of little interest to anyone other than the writer and perhaps a slim coterie of devotees.