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Blog Numbing Numbers

April 15, 2005 By Will Richardson

Paul Chenowith links to a new Perseus survey of the blogosphere with some numbers that seem strangely out of whack, at least to me. First, Perseus expects around 55 million blogs to have been created by year’s end, which is like six or seven times more than any other estimates I’ve seen. It says MSN Spaces has like 4.5 million sites, of which maybe I’ve seen three. And what the heck is Greatest Journal anyway?

Oy.

The report goes on to say that the first BloggerCon was the “inflection point” for the industry. Huh? And here’s a statistic near to my own heart: at the infamous Myspaces.com only a “somewhat greater” than 4.7% of their 12 million (12 million!?!) users have a blog. Are we still calling that a blog site? (Rhetorical question.)

And here I thought I had a pretty good pulse on the blogosphere…

Paul sums it up nicely, however.

All in all, however, I believe the escalating growth in the use of blogs by teens and young adults means that there are learning opportunities available. Ignoring the potential of blogs as an accepted/adopted learning tool among teens is rapidly fading option. Blogging is neither the end of the highway nor the finish line in the chase for technology, it is merely a barometer of things to come.

Go Blogs. Go!

Filed Under: General, Weblog Tech

Comments

  1. Lis Riba says

    April 19, 2005 at 6:36 am

    GreatestJournal is built upon LiveJournal code. When LiveJournal went down for a weekend back in January, a lot of LiveJournal addicts users created accounts there (or on DeadJournal or on any number of other sites built upon LJ code) so they could continue posting and communicating with one another. Those blogs have probably been largely abandoned, except as emergency backup blogs should another outage occur. But that may explain the sudden spike of users there.

    My server is down right now, but I wrote a Weblogs in a Nutshell post that goes into some of the statistics. [It was intially an internal document to explain some of the hype to coworkers and managers in my company.]

    When you look at the numbers in the Perseus study, remember this finding from their earlier survey:

    “66.0% of surveyed blogs had not been updated in two months. […] Apparently the blog-hosting services have made it so easy to create a blog that many tire-kickers feel no commitment to continuing the blog they initiate.” Of these, about half were “one-day wonders, with no postings on subsequent days.”

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