Colin Randall
On whatever authority, a site called the Blog Herald declares that there are now 70 million blogs in the world. For simplicity's sake, let us start with two big assumptions: the figure is right, and it includes 30 million individual bloggers (allowing for those who have two or more).
How many of them, like me, had not the faintest idea what a blog was as recently as 2004? That was the year in which I discovered that Alain Juppé, the former prime minister of France, had one. I was a quick learner, partly because the newspaper that employed me later introduced blogs written by various of its correspondents, and wanted those correspondents to include me, and partly because I was living among the French, who seemed to take more eagerly to the concept than most.
