Tomorrow will mark four years of blogging. It doesn’t seem like a long time, but in internet years it is an eternity.

In 2003, when I started this blog, there were about 1.4 million active blogs, total. It had been estimated that as many as 4 million blogs had been started by then, but most were abandoned. This is not a hard number because no one really was paying attention.

Today, Technorati tracks over 100 million blogs and discovers about 40,000 new blogs a day.

Blogs got their start in the late 1990s. In 1999, blogger started, but LiveJournal and other sites were already popular. Blogging grew steadily and then in 2003, when I started, there seemed to be blogs popping up all over.

Blogs are more sophisticated now. They used to be just online journals or a series of dated articles. Now blogs have rss feeds and all kinds of links and eye candy and extra functionality like ping backs. Blogs were used as spam for a while, but I think the software has caught up with that. Blogger.com still seems to be about 25% spam blogs. There are now Video blogs and Audio podcast blogs and the new little snippet blogs like Twitter. There are Blog Carnivals and blog aggregaters and every imaginable variation on online journaling.

I have actually had about a dozen blogs. The cat blog is defunct for now. It is hard to write about sick and dying cats every day. The tech blog was way too much work. The Rockland Community College blog for my class is gone as I am not teaching this semester. Sciencefictional and Johnny B’s blog are gone. I still have StellaMaeve.com for my friend’s daughter, but she never updates it and I won’t. I post rants to another blog, but it is unknown and is there only to satisfy me, more of a holding place in case Johnny B wants to come back.

I have www.harpamps.com and www.jt30.com as my main harmonica blogs. These are each about three years old. I used a blog format for several years before I knew what a blog was. I used to add new material to the top of the page and let the old stuff work its way down. I did this before the idea of a blog had been invented. Turning them into a blog just added the extra features like archives and the feeds and the ability to search.

I use blogger.com for most of my blogs, but I host the blogs on my own websites. This offers me the ability to control the data and make extra pages. It also lets me use one of my many domain names. I actually prefer WordPress software, except that I worry about backing up the data. I change web hosts every few years and I don’t like having to dump the databases and create a new DB every time I change hosts. Creating a WordPress theme is not as hard as making a blogger custom template.

I see blogging as a way to stay in touch with people that I would not ordinarily have a chance to talk with. I like to point to things and say “isn’t this neat” and I want to be able to announce things that are important. I am always surprised at how many strangers comment on my blogs, but few friends and relatives check out the pages here. I’ve made a few blog friends that I might actually like to meet some day. (No, I take that back – I will not expose myself to actual human contact!)