So.., blogging, what, why and who?

The term "weblog" was coined by Jorn Bargeron 17 December 1997. The short form, "blog," was coined by Peter Merholz, who jokingly broke the word weblog into the phrase we blog in the sidebar of his blog Peterme.com in April or May of 1999. Shortly thereafter, Evan Williams at Pyra Labs used "blog" as both a noun and verb ("to blog," meaning "to edit one's weblog or to post to one's weblog") and devised the term "blogger" in connection with Pyra Labs' Blogger product, leading to the popularization of the terms.
Now I'm using the product of Pyra Labs, created in 1999 and purchased in February 2003 by Google, blogger.com. The year 1999 was a starting point for some other blogging tools, e.g. livejournal.com, and blog usage started spreading and gaining in popularity.
By the way, speaking about the time before the year 1999. Early blogs were simply manually-updated components of common web sites. After almost 10 years passed statistics show the existence of over 112.8 million blogs, the figure that doesn't reffelct possibly the actual number of blogs. It was calculated by Technorati, Internet search engine for searching blogs, competing with Google and Yahoo. But only in China 72.82 millions blogs are registered, the ammount that wasn't possibly tracked by Technocratu due to the language, so loads of other blogs in other languages. Some people even have several blogs on diverse platforms. And some people have ceased posting to their online diaries, the estimated figure of dead blogs constitutes more tnan 200 milion.
In terms of why and who is blogging I suppose the answer can be diverse as people and purposes are. The most popular blogs are personal which are refered to as microblogging and more likely to respond to the style of diary. As for me the purpose is educational, now I'm starting to find blogging a really approriate and comfortable tool of recording knowledge and mainly thoughts that arise during the education process. I asked some of my friends why did they start blogging. They did it because some of their friends was already blogging and they wanted to be in touch with them and what is most important to recieve reaction on their posts-thoughts-life ocurrances.
In conclusion I'd like to share a very relavant link I encountered concerning the most powerful blogs.