This month’s state of the blogosphere survey by Technorati, the monitoring service, was greeted as if it were the online equivalent of the president’s State of the Nation address.
It undoubtedly reveals a fascinating array of statistics and confirms that blogging — the writing of online journals — is continuing to expand, albeit more slowly than before, and is still a force to be reckoned with. But for all the undisputed influence of blogs, the figures also show that blogging is still very much a minority sport.
According to Technorati, the number of web logs has risen to 70-million compared with 35-million about 320 days ago. But interestingly, only a third of these are English-language blogs. This is a great tribute to the way other languages have populated the space, led by the Japanese with an astonishing 37% of all blogs.
The number of English-language blogs is less than 24-million, a comparatively small proportion of the population of the United States (about 300-million), let alone that of Europe (well more than 700-million) — and since Technorati’s figures include people with multiple blogs and maybe (they don’t say) little-used ones as well, the number of individual bloggers is even lower.
Considering it is 10 years since the first web log was introduced and nearly eight years since easy-to-use blogs were pioneered by Blogger.com, the number of blogs in operation is not exactly mind-boggling when compared with other phenomena on the web, such as the 65 000-plus videos uploaded to YouTube every day.
MySpace, the biggest of an exploding constellation of social networking sites, only launched in 2003 yet claims 170-million mainly English-language members. A lot of these won’t be active, but most are — and every one of them has a blog attached waiting to be used, which Technorati in theory is including in its figures.
If there is a lesson here it is that blogging, for all its undoubted success in politics and the arts, hasn’t taken off in a way that many people, myself included, thought it would.
Of course, a lot of people who don’t blog themselves are still part of the movement through reading them or adding comments of their own at the bottom. But that doesn’t alter the fact that the act of blogging is turning out to be more of a spectator sport than we originally thought.
Social networkers, late arrivals on the scene as a mass movement, prefer to communicate directly with others in their chosen groups such as MySpace, Facebook, Bebo and all the others rather than blog or even email each other.
The strength of community networks is also reflected in LinkedIn, the site for business professionals, which this month notched up its 10-millionth user. I am no longer surprised when I ask for a show of hands at meetings to discover how few bloggers there are — and this is sometimes among journalism students for whom it ought to be essential if they want to get a media job.
Why is this? Years ago it may have been because it was complicated to set one up. That is no longer true, since it is possible to get a blog up and running in less than a minute these days, as long as you choose a login that hasn’t already been claimed by someone else. It could be that the vast majority of people prefer just to read blogs rather than write them, especially at a time when their proliferation — there are still 120 000 new ones every day around the world, notwithstanding the slowdown in the rate of growth — makes it much more difficult to gain an audience.
Far better to communicate through a peer group in a social networking environment where shared interests will guarantee you an audience, rather than propel your thoughts into the blogosphere where often they will be read by no one unless you have managed to build up a “brand”.
Dave Sifry, the man behind Technorati, decided this year to rename the exercise the state of the “live web” rather than just the blogosphere. That’s a smart move. — Guardian Unlimited Â