The blog became so popular it led to Croggon being offered a job as a critic with The Australian newspaper from 2007 to 2010.

The jack of all trades (Croggon is a poet, fantasy novelist, and writer, among many things) views blogging as an independent voice and believes the medium has become an important element of today’s online world.

‘‘I always felt like a bit of a crusader,’’ she reveals. ‘‘There was very little thoughtful, long-form theatre criticism that was publicly available and blogs and the internet offered the possibility of creating that.

‘‘What I really like is the control it gives.

‘‘I’m someone who’s often been misrepresented because I can be controversial or whatever and so I sort of feel there’s somewhere where for good or ill this is what I said. And it hasn’t been edited. That makes me sort of feel better, uncompromised.’’

The notion of free speech is one that resonates among bloggers, who welcome their increased exposure and acceptance in the mainstream.

‘‘I think it’s good,’’ says Wambach, when asked about the rise of bloggers.

‘‘I know that people get nervous about bloggers because they’re not professional, therefore they think anyone can write their opinion and put it out there and it might besmirch that restaurant’s reputation. [But] I guess the more blogs that are out there the more voices you’ve got.’’

So what exactly is the appeal of running your own blog?

Wambach suspects that once a blogger develops a readership base a sense of obligation and expectation follows.

‘‘I find it hard to go somewhere [to a restaurant] and not blog about it now.

‘‘Sometimes I’ll think, ‘Oh, I haven’t done an Indian place for a while’. So we’ll all go there even though I don’t really feel like eating it and then I’ll blog about it and nobody will comment and I’ll think, I did this for all you readers!’’

Other reasons behind the motivation to blog include the opportunity to build a community of like-minded people, and the power to instil change.

In the case of artist Rayna Fahey, the brain behind the blog ‘Radical Cross Stitch’, it was finding women who, like her, had a passion for using traditional cross stitch in radical ways.

Fahey’s work involves standard cross stitch with quite subversive messages, all with a sharp political edge, and most of it on non-traditional places, such as fences.

Her most famous work was stitching the words ‘‘I wanna live here’’ into the fence of a vacant block in Footscray in protest against housing affordability and the use of land across Melbourne.

Originally from New Zealand, Fahey started cross stitching to alleviate boredom when she became ill during pregnancy.

She was already running a website about politics when she decided to make room for another page on her woolly pastime. The visits to her website rocketed.

‘‘There’s not a major community for radical cross stitch so the internet is the main way that we can kind of communicate and form a community,’’ explains Fahey.

‘‘The people that I get messages from are people going, ‘Well, I thought I was the only one’, because the radical craft community is all over the world but they’re all really small, so it’s quite hard to find.’’

Connecting to people is what inspired entrepreneur Ed Dale to start a blog as a side project to his online business, which includes the No.1 business podcast in Australia and a satirical business cartoon on YouTube.

Describing himself as a ‘‘simple country boy’’, Dale created a web development company almost a decade ago, then sold it for millions.

True to his word, he doesn’t seem to have changed, wearing jeans and T-shirt while working from an iPad at a cafe in Moonee Ponds, which doubles as his office most days.

After selling his website portfolio, Dale moved into creating niche eBooks for small businesses, on anything from fly fishing to making jewellery.

Now he’s carving his way through teaching businesses about the online world.

A self-confessed hopeless writer, Dale says he started his eponymous blog as a personal challenge.

‘‘I got a complimentary pass in VCE and I failed English,’’ he chuckles.

‘‘I was hopeless at it, and so for me it was a bit of a challenge to try to teach myself to write because it was something I was poor at.

‘‘What’s most exciting, of course, is the opportunity it creates because literally anybody can be a publisher.’’

While the blog may have begun as a chance to express his views, Dale says it’s morphed into a face for his business, a path he expects most businesses to head down in the future.

Dale, who at last count had more than 48,000 Twitter followers, sees blogs becoming promotional tools.

Which immediately draws the question about blogs and their power to make money, a line Dale is happy to discuss.

The 41-year-old father of three is perhaps best known as one of the founders of the 30 Day Challenge, an annual program which challenges people to start an internet business and make their first dollar online within 30 days.

He says people blog for all sorts of reasons but rarely do they start out with the intention of making money.

‘‘Here’s the thing,’’ explains Dale. ‘‘If I didn’t make a cent would I still be blogging? Absolutely.

‘‘If it’s about the money, the problem with that is that you start trying to chase your audience. And you end up trying to please everybody. And in blogging, if you try to please everybody you please nobody.’’

Pleasing their audience, it seems, is the one thing all bloggers have in common.

When Fahey was pregnant with twins and holed up in intensive care she recalls thinking ‘’the internet’s going to wonder where I’ve gone’’.

Wambach, too, recounts having withdrawals when not being able to post.

‘‘The only reason I won’t post is because I’m busy,’’ she says.

‘‘When I say to my friends I’m going to take a break and I’m going to put up a notice and say I’m going on a break they’re like ‘Why? You don’t need to, just don’t do anything’.

‘‘And I’m like, Oh, I don’t know. I just don’t want people to think I disappeared.’’