Here’s a thing: did you know that 83 blogs are created every minute of every day? No, neither did I. Put more succinctly 120,000 new blogs are created worldwide each day and every day with 112.8 million blogs being tracked by Technorati.

Mind you, blogs have been around for quite a while beginning first in 1994 as online diaries before turning into personal web pages in 2002 when they really ‘took off’ to become the phenomena they are today. So I suppose these figures should come as no surprise and just goes to show how many people are ‘out there’ writing and sharing their world with others.

However (and this shows my ignorance) I honestly thought people just wrote one blog, possibly two at a push, so I was humbled by my meagre attempts when I read in ProBlogger.com that there are some who write twenty blogs a day! The mind boggles. Of course, this has all to do with that same old chestnut: How Can I Make Money Out Of The Internet?

When I was a kid I kept a diary and made a fair bit of money out of that. Every Christmas my brother and I received a small leather-bound diary from our grandparents to whom we would promise faithfully to record our daily activities. Upon each visit we’d drag out our diaries (hastily written up the night before) and lo and behold, we’d find a silvery half crown coin slipped in between the pages. My piggy bank soon swelled. Keeping a diary was instilled in me by my father. He had kept one as a child and wrote one during his war years. Later he wrote specific diaries of holidays spent abroad with my mother’s Belgian family (quite the mine-field I can assure you and no doubt made my father’s war effort look tame in comparison) and, being the gifted artist that he was, interspersed his writings with comical drawings.

I think, had he been alive today, he would have been very bemused by today’s brew of digital media. Not only do we have blogs, websites, twitters and Wikis, but also Mashups and RSS feeds and this is without the addition of image sharing by way of Flickr and YouTube. Talking of which, this morning I came across an interesting article (BBC News Magazine) written by Tom Geoghegan entitled Innocent Photographer or terrorist? It’s a wonderful piece which relates the mishaps of a number of innocent holidaymakers getting apprehended by police or security guards in the pursuit of their hobby. Thankfully I’ve not had any such occurrence happen to me, but then again, I can’t quite imagine the French Riviera ever becoming camera-shy.