Blogging Is Not A Minority Sport
I take issue with a piece that Victor Keegan of the UK’s Guardian Unlimited wrote today, called To the average Joe, blogs aren’t cutting it.
Keegan’s argument boils down to a few main points. Let’s take a look at them:
* Blogging is “very much a minority sport” because, according to the recent State of Technorati report, the blogosphere has doubled in size, from 35 million blogs to 70 million, in the last 320 days.
Keegan argues that because English-language blogs now number in the 24 million range, that is a sign that the blogosphere is waning in influence as compared to the proliferation of video uploading/sharing and social networking.
I find this assertion to be incorrect in several ways. The fact that non-English language blogs now make up the majority of the blogosphere is astounding, and means that there’s a galaxy of conversations and developments going on that we in the West are largely unaware of. I would think that this part of the web will only continue to grow and develop.
Also, doubling in size to 70 million blogs in less than a year is an enormous increase, particularly when considering that writing a blog with any regularity is hard. Just as most people who start a novel never finish, most blogs are abandoned in less than a year, and many don’t make it past a few posts. I would think that now that blogs have been around for a decade, people consider this difficulty before taking the plunge. I’d love to see numbers on current activity of blogs founded within the last few years as compared to an earlier period.
* Despite success “in politics and the arts,” blogging hasn’t “taken off” in a way people thought it would.
I don’t understand the rationale behind this assertion. In size and in quality, the blogosphere is big and bad and thriving. Blogging and online media are fundamentally rocking traditional media to its very core. Online mainstream media publications are implementing blogs into their offerings, professional journalists and CEOs and well known public figures are blogging as never before, bringing the public closer to the action and inviting them to partake in the conversation.
“Blogging” is now mainstream, and the blogosphere is maturing. That maturity is reflected in both the sheer growth in the number of blogs as well as the innumerable ways that blogs are shaping the Internet… and even in the ways that it is shaping such things as social networking and other “web 2.0″ applications.
The “new black” in blogging, for instance, is “micro blogging,” proven out by Twitter, the latest craze, and other services like JaikuL and Tumblr.
People are finding ways to communicate and share information, and blogs are an essential component in that.
The Media Age rightly points out that blogging “is absolutely a losing business proposition” because of the time required to do it, and to do it right. I would argue though that most do it not for money but for the passion of sharing information and ideas and engaging readers in conversation. And in fact those with the most passion for this have the best shot at cranking out a winning business proposition.
* “… the act of blogging is turning out to be more of a spectator sport than we originally thought.”
Hilarizor! The argument used to be that no one read blogs because all blog readers were too busy writing and hawking their own blogs. A growing non-writing reader base for blogs – any blogger will tell you this – is a gorgeous, gorgeous thing.
The blogosphere is maturing and continuing to expand at a strong if not astronomical rate. More important than sheer numbers though is that blogs continue to have a profound influence on the online media world and among other innovations is increasingly becoming integrated with more traditional media offerings.
Far being a minority sport, the blogosphere is big time big leagues.
