According to Technorati there are a million blogs posted every day, and I feel proud to be one of them, though I feel like a late adapter as I finally got around to starting mine as the whole thing appears to be reaching saturation levels.
A study done by Universal McCann in 2008 found that 184 million people had blogs — 26.4 million in the US. On closer investigation, many if not most of these however are inactive, which goes to show that anyone can start a blog but not many can keep one going. And how many are actually being read on a regular basis? That would be the defining statistic, which I don’t seem to be able to find from any credible source. My guess is that the inactive and unread make up about 80% of that total.
What I want to know is, are blogs still relevant?
To find that answer I delve to into the newly published book on the history of blogs written by Scott Rosenberg, entitled Say Everything: How Blogging Began, What It’s Becoming and Why It Matters.
It all started of course with the establishment of the WWW in 1990 by British software engineer Tim Berners-Lee, who also built the first website: http://info.cern.ch. Then we have the acknowledged founder of the blog, Evan Williams, and all the pioneers who have helped evolve blogs from basic diaries to a platform for opinion, information and exchange.
One of the more interesting issues Rosenberg raises is that of credibility, as the line between blogging and journalism have become increasingly blurred. Can bloggers replace journalists? His answer: bloggers largely cannot be journalists, as they lack the rules, documentation, fact-checking, ethics and writing skills. But journalists make excellent bloggers.
That’s good news for this old journalist.
The conclusion I come to is that blogs are relevant if the readers of blogs perceive them to be, so the majority are not.
Leave a Comment so far
Leave a comment
