In the Summer 2005 edition of Forbes.com Best of The Web, our editors have trained their sights on the rapidly expanding world of blogs, collectively known as the "blogosphere."
Blogs (short for Weblogs) started out mostly as personal Web journals. However, thanks to sites like Google’s Blogger, which allows people to easily create blogs in a matter of minutes, these homespun Internet outposts are rapidly expanding and evolving. At this writing, there are some 14 million blogs, growing at a rate of 12,000 a day. Cumulatively, bloggers post content about 275,000 times per day on nearly every topic or niche imaginable. One study claims that more than 50 million people regularly read blogs.
here are medical blogs featuring the diaries and experiences of licensed physicians; economic scholars use blogs to post their opinions about subjects as varied as China’s energy consumption and Australia’s benign housing bubble. Shopaholics have created online journals like Mightygoods.com, whose publisher, Margaret Mason, scours the Web to bring readers wish-list items like the fuchsia/orange embroidered cutwork-silk pillows currently selling at Gumps for $75. Some blogs uncover scoops that occasionally have a big impact--as CBS News’ former anchorman Dan Rather can readily testify.
Of course, most blogs are mind-numbingly dull. You need to dig deep to find the gems and that is exactly what Best of The Web has done for you. We identify 100 of the best blogs in 20 categories ranging from Art and Literary blogs, to Small Business, Marketing, Shopping and Music blogs. Read More...
