How big is blogging?

Some time early this morning, a single blogging platform – WordPress, the one that powers this site – was downloaded for the 500,000th time.

Bear in mind that to install WordPress, you need more than just the free directory your average ISP provides. You need to be able to run technologies like MySQL (a database) and PHP (a sophisticated scripting language)… which nearly always means that WordPress blogs are being installed on sites that someone is paying actual extra bucks for.

A lot of us are people who outgrew free services like Blogger, and wanted the ability to take a more active part in the conversations going on out there. The explosion in WordPress and other powerful blogging software suggests to me that this is becoming about a lot more than just uploading weekly pictures of your cat.* A large and growing number of people are embracing the potential for blogging to link us in ways we haven’t anticipated yet.

* Not That There’s Anything Wrong With That.

← The Telus lockout: So what's in it for me? Mambo missteps: a major split at an open-source CMS →

2 Comments

Evan Leeson on 18 Aug 2005 at 08:57

Blogging is a core technology in the set of technologies that make up social networking as a new-ish phenomenon. Others include file sharing, tagging, super-blogs (vivelecanada.ca, dailkos.com, etc.), podcasting, among others.

In some ways it feels like a lonely thing, staring at a screen. But if you think back over time, that moment of realisation or insight that hits you when you encounter some fact or idea via this network, and the collaboration or shared experience that results, changes that sense of isolation into a feeling of connectedness.

It is an effective foil for the negative effects of isolating, one-way older mass media. And it is a way to regain the benefits and humanity of an older era when community was purely physical and proximate, as were economy and politics. The latter are changing, and so is community.

Evan Leeson on 21 Aug 2005 at 17:59

As a quick follow-up, here’s a book about the japanese experience of Keitai, which resembles what I describe above.

Evan Leeson on 18 Aug 2005 at 08:57
Blogging is a core technology in the set of technologies that make up social networking as a new-ish phenomenon. Others include file sharing, tagging, super-blogs (vivelecanada.ca, dailkos.com, etc.), podcasting, among others.
In some ways it feels like a lonely thing, staring at a screen. But if you think back over time, that moment of realisation or insight that hits you when you encounter some fact or idea via this network, and the collaboration or shared experience that results, changes that sense of isolation into a feeling of connectedness.
It is an effective foil for the negative effects of isolating, one-way older mass media. And it is a way to regain the benefits and humanity of an older era when community was purely physical and proximate, as were economy and politics. The latter are changing, and so is community.
Evan Leeson on 21 Aug 2005 at 17:59
As a quick follow-up, here’s a book about the japanese experience of Keitai, which resembles what I describe above.