Ungeek It

Is the face of blogging changing? Industry analysts predict that the media is peaking now, and it could be downhill from here. I question whether it isn’t simply changing into something that we can’t anticipate today.

Nielsen’s Blogpulse statistics are stunning:

Total identified blogs: 50,142,361
New blogs in last 24 hours: 102,928
Blog posts indexed in last 24 hours: 897,972

In December 2006, Gartner estimated that based on the average lifespan of a blogger and the growth rates of blogs, the number of bloggers would peak at around 100 million “at some point in the first half of 2007,” according to a press release.

Blogging is one of the vanguard phenomena of web 2.0. In many ways, it’s one of the easiest and most accessible ways for a web user to generate content. All bloggers need is a web browser and Internet access, nothing more… no coding skills, no video equipment, no audio editing software.

It’s probably useful to ask the question: what is a blog? How does a blog differ from a website? A webzine? A CMS-run site? A forum?

Already, bloggers have branched out: some podcast, photoblog, videoblog, or twitter. Some monetize, adding ads, and some aggregate, mashing up diverse content together into a single stream. Some single bloggers run multiple blogs, and some highly popular blogs are collaborative team efforts.

Given the tremendous variety of bloggish sites, and the blurriness of the lines, how can the analysts effectively measure what’s growing, transforming and what’s shrinking? Where do you draw the line and say “This is a blog – and this is not?”

Some industry estimates say that more than 200 million people call themselves ex-bloggers. The Internet is littered with dead blogs; Mark Sifry at Technorati indicates that only 21.75% of all blogs on the Internet are active.

I for one would appreciate it if folks would archive their sites and release their domain names after a period of time – say 12 months?? - if they decide not to continue.

I informally surveyed ten of my colleagues. My scientific methodology? The ten IT professionals that sit closest to me when I’m working in the office.

• Three of us blog – that are willing to admit it. Two of us have multiple blogs.
• Two more of us keep photo archives online but don’t actually write content.
• Two of the nonbloggers admire the practice and say they would if they had the inclination to write and the time.
• Three of the nonbloggers just don’t get why people blog, although they read blogs from time to time.
• None of us are ex-bloggers.
• As a matter of fact, I don’t know any ex-bloggers – but my acquaintainces are primarily within the technology profession, and that may skew the demographic.

A more professional survey is the Pew Internet and American Life Report on Bloggers that I summarized earlier this year.

So, bottom line – I don’t think blogging is dying. I think it’s changing, transforming, becoming. Unless the studies can track what those bloggers are doing next with all that unbridled energy and technical creative force, I don’t think the statistics paint an accurate picture.

The Internet of today is a completely different world than it was ten years ago, in ways we could not have predicted or anticipated. The web of the next decade and beyond will be just as revolutionary.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 19th, 2007 at 7:03 am and is filed under blogging. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.