For the weekend edition of The Wall Street Journal 7/14 - 7/15 the feature article was to commemorate the 10 year anniversary of when Blogs were born. It really comes to no surprise that the publication was able to come up with a group of influential individuals from all fields and walks of life to give personal thoughts about the importance of blogs. Great article for me as the woefully aspiring blogger and somebody who would like to be reading more of what’s out there.

Among the mini-pieces that made up the article, the one that struck me the greatest was submitted by Dick Costolo, the former CEO of Feedburner, and a current Group Product Manager for Google. He focuses on something that isn’t as clear to people of my generation, but in my opinion was the heart of why blogs are so magical. Costolo laments about a time when there was a distinct lack of opportunity for somebody to receive updates about occurrences within a community of interest when that individual was in some remote area relative to that community. He cites an interest in venture capital by a person living in Detroit. The options presented for overcoming this remoteness during a pre-blog era were moving to Silicon Valley or be at the whim of publishers of newletters, who assuredly are from such an area and would be writing about topics more particular to that geographic region and also charge an arm and a leg to relay their published material to you. With the advent of blogs, not only has this predicament been erased, but there becomes a new concept of zero-cost publishing. Now anybody can not only receive articles from any topic of their heart’s content but can also, write their own with an equal opportunity to be read and judged with the best of them.

Along with his mini-piece, Costolo shared some of his favorite blogs, one of them being under the blogspot.com domain. It really is fantastic that getting into the arena of blogging not only is cheap (if not free), but also incredibly easy. I had never looked at it before, but I was curious to see what the most popular free blogging sites are. Without doing a whole ton of searching, this is what I’ve got:

Typepad.com
Blogger.com
Wordpress.com
Okayblog.net
Livejournal.com
Blog.com

But clearly the millions of search results make no list look complete. Then there is no way to forget the free blogging available from within profiles of countless social networking sites cropping up including the powerhouses of Facebook and MySpace, where my buddy had been updating one in reverence to the great Bill Simmons of ESPN Page 2 fame. Blogs are literally everywhere among the younger generations, to the extent that daily blog roundups appear in print publications like the daily Express newspaper (the free news outlet of the Washington Post). Without a doubt the impacts are only at their beginnings.