The Rise and Rise of Blogs

futurelab default header

by: Gary Hayes

A fabulous, clear page from David Sifry on the growth of the blogosphere as at April 2006. His exec summary:

In summary:

  • The blogosphere is doubling in size every 6 months
  • It is now over 60 times bigger than it was 3 years ago
  • On average, a new weblog is created every second of every day
  • 19.4 million bloggers (55%) are still posting 3 months after their blogs are created
  • Technorati tracks about 1.2 Million new blog posts each day, about 50,000 per hour

I like the phrase 50,000 per hour, suddenly quantity measurement turns into speed – but I digress. Here shamelessly is the chart that most astounds me from his posting (note this is an image link not a copy locally onto my server – David will understand)

The other chart that fascinates me is the peak chart on his page. It certainly shows the psychographic, gadget/nerd make-up of the audience (hence ‘boing boing’ being top dog most of the time) when iPod video and intel mac announcments get more daily posting peaks than Live8, Indian Tsunami and Superbowl.

I am trying to work out where this is heading. It is curving upward in true exponential fashion. Does this mean everyone on the planet will have their own online journal in a few years? Will the tools become so commonplace that we have it built into every device, speech to text, or even every device has an IP address that can be accessed from anywhere. If you allow it your digital video camera has a ‘allow/disallow’ function. In WiMax zones around the world your content can be picked up from anywhere else. Why bother publishing it when the raw content can be perused. Perhaps intelligent edit algorithms built into ‘capture’ devices simply make just the good bits accessible. A world of every device IP connected. Bits of peoples lives captured transparently in fragments across this sea of devices. Agents piece together stories, mashing together these fragments (with user consent) to be shared, instantaneously globally. Anyway that’s to come – for the moment here am I typing text into wordpress, movabletype, blogger etc: It’s easier than it was – but my word is it going to get easier!

Original Post: http://www.personalizemedia.com/index.php/2006/04/19/the-rise-and-rise-of-blogs/