In the course of your net-life, you’ve probably tripped over abbreviations like ISBN, ISSN, and others. I am not going to dig deep in the history of IBSN, but I will tell you that this new standard was born on February 2nd, 2006, as an answer to the Spanish administration’s negative to grant an ISSN to Internet Blogs.

The IBSN is a 10-digit number that’s there to uniquely identify each blog. There are, at the time of press, over 27.8 million blogs, not counting professional newspapers, out there. The number is rapidly growing.

The nice thing is that journalists or citizen journalists can pick their number. ISSN attributes you a serial number, taking away your chance of choosing a personalized one. We’ve managed to find one free in the database, that wasn’t already taken.

The project is at its first days of existence, but growing fast. We for once, are proud to be one of the first online publications to get our unique serial number from this Web 2.0 authority. Yes, the IBSN is a Web 2.0 standard, and a growing Web 2.0 project.

On many blogs around the internet, there’s a long talk about Web 2.0 companies that are wishing, or wanting to get involved in the project. That’s a good thing, and yes, we’ll be soon joining them, as soon as we can.

The great effort of maintaining this growing database is too much for a couple of people that contributed to the project. Most of the blogs that adopted the idea were, a few time ago, just Spanish, but at press time, many international English publications have adopted the standard. We’re one of them, and we’re glad.

A Bit Of History Of Serial Numbers

In 1965, W. H. Smith, the largest single book retailer in Great Britain, announced its plans to move to a computerized warehouse in 1967 and wanted a standard numbering system for books it carried. They hired consultants to work on behalf of their interest, the British Publishers Association’s Distribution and Methods Committee and other experts in the U.K. book trade.

They devised the Standard Book Numbering, SBN, system in 1966 and it was implemented in 1967. At the same time, the International Organization for Standardization Technical Committee on Documentation, TC 46, set up a working party to investigate the possibility of adapting the British SBN for international use.

A meeting was held in London in 1968 with representatives from Denmark, France, Germany, Eire, the Netherlands, Norway, the United Kingdom, the United States of America, and an observer from UNESCO. Other countries contributed written suggestions and expressions of interest.

A report of the meeting was circulated to all ISO member countries. Comments on this report and subsequent proposals were considered at meetings of the working party held in Berlin and Stockholm in 1969. As a result of the thinking at all of these meetings, the International Standard Book Number, ISBN, was approved as an ISO standard in 1970, and became ISO 2108.

That original standard has been revised as book and book-like content appeared in new forms of media, but the basic structure of the ISBN as defined in that standard has not changed and is in use today in almost 150 countries.