Sure, there have been programs like FrontPage for several years and it’s true that made it easier for some to build there own sites, but it still was extremely time consuming and the results were often less than desirable.  If you had to have a Web developer build your site and most everyone did during Web 1.0 chances were you were also locked into having them make all your updates which could get very expensive if you had frequent changes.

In a Web 2.0 world anyone can have a presence on the Internet.  If you’ve been thinking you’d like to have a Web site presence I’d suggest going with a content management system like WordPress which is rightly and accurately  billed as a “personal publishing platform.” Even if you have to hire someone to install it, you’ll be able to manage it so easily that you may never need a Web master again.

The short answer is nope, we aren’t.  The longer answer is that there are 50 million active blogs worldwide and an untold number of readers of blogs.  A “blog post” is nothing more or less than a page on a Website.  What blogging platforms have done is to make it incredibly easy for more people to create web pages and have a voice on the Internet.  So quite the opposite of being shut-ins bloggers come from all walks of life with all sorts of interests.

The question of who reads them is the same as asking who searches the Internet?  Since a blog post is just a blog page and since those pages get indexed just like any other pages people run across them in their searches all the time.