Trends in blogoland

Dave Sifry wrote an interesting article for Technorati about the state of the blogosphere. He points out that there are currently 35.3 million weblogs. The whole blogosphere doubles every six months; it's now over 60 times bigger than it was three years ago. So when I started blogging on February 9, 2002 (4.3 years ago), apparently I was an early adopter. Now the blogosphere gets really crowded, every second a new weblog is being 'birthed'.

Of these new weblogs 45% dies straight after birth, so there's a massive 'digital child starvation' going on, and what's worse - the parents of these babies just leave their 'bodies' on the web for everyone to see. That's quite rude. Realising that many of these are teenagers, I would say: "hey, don't have sex if you're not ready to raise a child."

Then there's also a substantial group that birthes a blog, without giving it proper attention. That creates its own set of problems; it means that several years from now we will see many psychologists specializing in 'weblog abandonment', and 'lack of parental attention for weblogs'.

This brings the real active (weekly) bloggers down to 3.9 million. And according to Sifry this group often rides the wave of world events (see the graph).

Comments

[Martin Winter]

I confess to having let my weblog starve (at least for the moment). It's not that I don't have any material, on the contrary. I guess it's the old trap of wanting to "do a good job when I have time" and ending up doing nothing at all. Well, you definitely woke me up again :^)