I see Dave Sifry (who I interviewed on PodLeaders.com a couple of weeks ago) has published a new quarterly State of the Blogosphere.
Dave’s main findings are that the blogosphere is still doubling in size every 6 months – so it is maintaining its rate of virtually exponential growth. The blogosphere is over 60 times bigger than it was only 3 years ago.
The main points to note are:
- Technorati now tracks over 35.3 Million blogs
- On average, a new weblog is created every second of every day
- Technorati tracks about 1.2 Million new blog posts each day, about 50,000 per hour and, most interesetingly,
- 19.4 million bloggers (55%) are still posting 3 months after their blogs are created
Do you still think blogging is a fad?
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No, but I think it’s suffering from an over-inflated sense of importance.
99% of blogs are complete dross that no one reads. The other 1% consist of ’superstar’ bloggers who merely link backwards and forwards between each other on a daily basis tooting their own horns.
Blogs are not going to change the world.
Thanks Derek – as I’m not in the superstar camp – I guess that means this blog is complete dross that no-one reads.
You are correct to say that blogs are not going to change the world – but they are changing selected parts of it – blogs are fundamentally changing the world of PR, the world of corporate communications and the world of journalism to name three off the top of my head.
Not at all Tom.
I buy into the idea of blogging – I’m even a card carrying FeedDemon user.
But you know the general point I’m making. The aforementioned 99% are this web generation’s “my cat” pages.
As a developer, I became aware of blogging through the various developer blogs discussing the latest CSS hacks and what-not.
RSS is a genuinely useful technology (even if there are at least seven versions so far this week).
For me blogging all went a bit Spinal Tap when Dave Winer proclaimed it to be the biggest cultural event since the printing press.
You have prominent bloggers talking about ‘their readers’, their role as social commentators etc. and well, it’s all a little self conceited.
A large dollop of reality is sorely overdue in the blogging community. It’s not that blogging is not a valuable thing – it is to those interested, it’s that most of the world is getting along just fine without it.
Let’s have fun with blogging but let’s not overplay its importance.
Blogging is not a fad, wait till the myspace generation hits the workforce in a few years.
It’s up to readers to prune their reading lists so if somebody wants to read about cats and their employer is happy to pay them to do that, they might as well read a cat’s blog.
But if someone’s interested in getting a free flow of news, targeted at their specialism, they could do much worse than read tech blogs like this one. That’s how journos, VCs, and educators keep abreast technology without drowning in it.
Occasionally, one encounters some flotsam along the way but it’s much the same when wading through company e-mail, isn’t it?
It’s up to readers to prune what they see. Smart readers can learn cool things by pulling in their news through filters offered by bloggers. This blogging thing isn’t going away anytime soon.