Blogs are increasingly popular, and can have a dramatic effect on search engine positioning.

"With blogs and RSS feeds, content is updated in real time," said Jeremy Zawodny of Yahoo! "And people who want to get the updated information can get them. It is changing the way that people get their information from search engines; it is aggregating information. Since feeds are machine readable, there is no guessing game with constructing pages. The machine-readable nature makes this very precise and easy to work with. The technical challenge involved in getting into the RSS feed wasn't anywhere near the challenge that HTML was, and still is in many respects."

Not surprisingly, it is the abundance of this seemingly "trivial" information that makes blogs so compelling. Blogs have become increasingly popular to audiences because they offer a variety of new information sources on a multitude of very specific topics. "There are 4.1 million different blogs. That number is expected to grow to 10.3 million by the end of this year," said Amanda Watlington of Searching for Profit. The majority of blog readers are 25-50 years old, and they visit blogs because they provide news that isn't readily available elsewhere.

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