Hurray! Celebrating 10 years of blogging

It has been ten years since the revolution of the Blogs started.
But the blogosphere never seemed that old, always bubbling with the
newest & the most interesting of the ideas. Although blogs (as we
know them) are a decade old but still Microsoft Word doesn’t recognize
it and pops up with many strange substitutes to replace it. I think the
old boy (Microsoft) should fast catch up with the blogosphere’s
terminology.

Although there were ‘proto-blogs’ even
before Dec. 23, 1997, which is regarded by most as the point of
emergence of the blog, but the real blogging as we see it now
effectively began when common people like you, me & many others
decided to voice their opinions through the Internet, share their views
and get to interact with people over issues relating from politics,
national security and sex scandals to climate change, sex and
celebrities.

It was a proto blog by the Drudge Report
which spilled beans in the Monica Lewinsky affair, an incident which
resulted in the impeachment of President Bill Clinton. It is
interesting to note that Newsweek had dropped the story at the last
minute but caught the eye of the popular news site.

Blog
has turned into a tool for the common man to fight the injustice of the
government. In India, students protested the acquittal of an accused
who was let off by the courts because the police (under pressure from
highly placed officials) tampered with the evidence. The pressure from
the public forced the government to reopen the case, justice was
delivered & the accused is now behind the bars. The students, apart
from making public demonstrations, used blogs as a tool to put spread
awareness and put pressure on the government.

Blogs have
provided an opportunity to the common people to voice their concerns
about government policies and anyone can propose alterations in those
policies. People are not happy with US Vice President Dick Cheney and
the web is literally filled with blogs & sites asking for support
to impeach him – that’s the real power of the blog; keeping the
politicians on their feet, reminding them continuously that every move
of theirs is watched & scrutinized by the general public.

While
for some blogging is an opportunity for making money, for others it is
a fun tool just for announcing to the world who they are & how they
are enjoying their lives. Technorati tracks more than 70 million blogs
and according to some estimates 120,000 blogs are added everyday (1.4
blogs every second).

Blogging could mean different things
to different people but the reason I love it is because there is no one
big or small in the blogospdruhere, everybody gets a fair chance to
express his/her views. I think blogging is one of the best things that
happened in the last century. No one has the exact idea how the
blogosphere will transform in the coming years but I surely want to be
part of it.