David Sifry reports that Technorati is now tracking 7.8 million blogs… and that number has been doubling every five months.
The ease of push-button publishing is almost certainly one of this trend’s drivers; so is the fact that skimming and reading blogs has become so much easier (making them even more attractive to potential publishers).
Tomorrow, he’ll be publishing information about volume – not just how many blogs are out there, but how much content they’re generating. (I’m also curious about geography. The word at Northern Voice, a recent blogging conference in Vancouver, was that Latin America has proven to be very fertile ground for bloggers.)
What does this suggest?
First, the days when simply having a blog is noteworthy are numbered. We’ll soon be getting to the point where it’s like having a web site or a phone number. Of course you do – the question is, what are you doing with it?
Second, there is clearly a huge hunger out there for self-expression – from people mouthing off about politics, to non-tech hobbyists (Google knitting blogs and you’ll get more than 32,000 hits), to organizations and corporations, to gamers, to philosophers, to would-be journalists, to actual journalists, to people who want to tell you the cute thing their cat did today.
And third, the lines may soon blur between blogs and other content-managed web sites, and the term “blog” may well fall out of use. So many people are blogging in so many different ways, with such different content and approaches, to such different ends, that calling something a “blog” will say very little about it… and what sense of community exists among bloggers today may well fade away.
But maybe not. The definition of a blog may just become more specific, embracing in particular its more personal and community-building elements, including commenting, multiple authors, trackback and blogrolling.
