By the late 1990s however, they were all the rage and highly fashionable. Whether it was just a rough hack with some scanned snapshots of your baby and the cat -- or a slick multi-media extravaganza, building a personal web-page was "in."

These days, a regular personal web-page is so passé and if you want to rejoin the in-crowd, you've got to become a "blogger"

Yes, in an area which has prided itself on creating new technospeak terms, the Internet community has really outdone itself this time with the word "blog" (an abreviation of the term "weblog").

So what is a blog and why are they so very popular?

Although they do tend to vary a little, most blogs are a cross between an online diary and a list of "hey, look at this" bookmarks to and critiques of "interesting" stuff the blogger has found on the Net.

Readers Say (updated hourly) Nothing Yet Have Your Say

When it comes to voyeurism the dorm-cam is dead. It's been replaced by the blog.

Keen bloggers often update their pages many times a day -- which means that they're usually packed full of fresh content.

Of course the big problem is that a huge percentage of the blogs out there are filled with garbage. Quantity and quality are often mutually exclusive so finding the gems amongst the mud can be difficult -- and traditional search engines won't help much due to the almost realtime nature of the blog.

However, weblogs have become so popular now that there are search-engines and portals dedicated to indexing their content. A good example of this is DayPop which lets you search the current contents of almost 8,000 weblogs and news sites for tasty morsels.

With the amount of information on the Net still growing at a break-neck pace, finding a couple of good weblogs can be a great way to ease the burden of sorting the wheat from the chaffe. Instead of wading through the flotsam and jetsam of the web to find items of interest, simply find a weblog operated by a blogger with similar interests and perspectives to your own -- chances are that they'll have done all the hard work for you and compiled a list of links to all the good stuff of the day.

So, is blogging just another form of vanity publishing or is it the next big thing?

Well blogging is not that new actually. Look closely and you'll see that it's really just an informal and less structured version of the aggregation activities that have been around for a long time.

One could describe the very popular Arts & Letters Daily site as a type of weblog. I guess the same could be said for Aardvark -- where I publish links to stories that I find interesting alongside my own comments.

It would appear that the weblog is just an old horse with a new blanket perhaps?

My suggestion is that the next time you've got a few hours to spare, check out as many weblogs as you can -- and bookmark those that take your fancy. In an era when much of the Net's content is being commercialised it's rather nice to find that some of these little "personalised" pieces of content are real goldmines of information.

If you're a blogger, let me know. If there's enough interest I'll put up a directory page so that others can check out your weblog.

Have your say.

Aardvark's Garage Sale
It's time to clear out the closet here at Aardvark's country residence so I'm having a bit of a garage sale. I need to spend a whole lot more time and money on my jet engine R&D activities (now that the defense industry has shown a very real interest) -- so I'm trying to scrape up some more cash.

I'm selling my pulsejet manufacturing business. This would be perfect for either a semi-retired engineer/machinist who wants to earn some pretty good money building these things and exporting them to the world -- or an established engineering shop who want to break into a new (very export oriented) market. I can provide an ongoing stream of orders through my website and since I've run out of time to meet the demand, the sale will include a growing "waiting list" of new customers ready to place their orders.

Anyone interested in any of these things should drop me a line.

Add Aardvark To Your Own Website!
Got a moment? Want a little extra fresh content for your own website or page?

Just add a couple of lines of JavaScript to your pages and you can get a free summary of Aardvark's daily commentary -- automatically updated each and every week-day.

Aardvark also makes a summary of this daily column available via XML using the RSS format. More details can be found here.

Contact me if you decide to use either of these feeds and have any problems.

Did you tell someone else about Aardvark today? If not then do it now!