mediajunk

It’s almost hard to believe, but this blog will be a year old tomorrow. The last 12 monhts really have flown.

Since the beginning, Mediajunk has concentrated on new media news and analysis, with particular focus on the identifying “what’s hot” in internet culture.

Of course, technology companies have vested interests in hyping up technologies such as WAP or services such as subscription-based personalised news sites – but such hype rarely reflects the way the internet is used by “ordinary” people across the world.

Among the topics and themes I’ve focused on, blogs and blogging have been top of the list. I genuinely believe that the emergence of blogging has been one of the major events in the evolution of the web. This is what I meant when I predicted, last December, that 2003 would be “the year of the blog” – and so it has been. That blogging came to prominence during the Iraq war was, I believe, incidental – (it would have happened anyway); though Salam Pax’s weblog certainly drew a lot of media attention.

The main surprise, for me, has been that celebrity weblogs have not yet taken off (unless you count US politicians as celebrities), but I think over the coming year or two, when blogs creep more and more into the mainstream, we will see blogs being used by the celebrity industry.

Another theme that I’ve explored in depth during the past year has been the development of search engine technology, particularly by the industry leader Google. Within the last twelve months, search engines have become the “red hot” sector of the internet, and it has become an exciting area to watch, what with all the mergers and acquisitions and, most recently, Microsoft’s moves to enter into the search arena.

Among the most popular entries are those that discuss the differences between male and female bloggers (partly because of prominence in Google for searches related to these topics) and the various posts on celebrity weblogs.

The blog has also built up quite a large readership – over 500 unique visitors now log on to mediajunk.com every day. The site registered over 22,000 page views last month alone.

Most of those page views have come from regular visitors – so thanks to all of you who frequently check in! I hope you keep coming back over the next 12 months, and long into the future…