Testing My Google Fu

Whilst setting things up at Technorati in a no doubt misguided attempt to step even further into this brave new world of blogging I stumbled across an interesting article at CyberJournalism. (Not that I’m trying to be a journalist or anything out here on the vast
long tail of the digital frontier, I’d settle for being a Paine-like pamphleteer at this point. Journalists have to back up their sources. Polemics just have to have enough hot air to stay aloft. By the way, check out that Alexis post, fascinating, fascinating stuff. Remind me to find out just how many people are on the web, how many watch primetime TV, and then figure out just how much “ratings share” a web site can expect compared to total population.) which says a lot of things but basically that there’s a new blog being created every half second every minute of every hour of every day. And that we can only expect that rate to get faster, not slower.

The rate at which the indexed blogosphere is doubling has slowed but at this point it's large enough to be fighting against the power of the inverse square law. But, to me, the most significant measure is how many new people opt into the system. There are at present somewhere like 50 million blogs and in less than seven months that number will double. But there are over 6 billion people on the planet. Even throwing out the possibility of one person having multiple blogs – which is certainly true, I’m just not sure how big of a phenomenon it is – then that’s only one blog for every sixty people on the planet. Factor in the gradual creep of technology to the so-called developing world and, well, that doesn’t sound anything like market saturation to me.

Makes me wonder a few things:

• What’s the world going to be like when everyone who wants or is capable of having one has a blog?
• Just how hard is it for people to make those four clicks and fill out a few data fields that got me this blog?
• How many of those blogs actually succeed? The figures escape my google fu at the moment but the ratio of successful start ups to failed ones is abysmally low. And that’s just for the first year of operation. Long-term, continued success is extraordinarily difficult. For a business, anyway.
• At what point can a blog be considered to have become “profitable” and no longer be a startup[1]?
• Have I, proud participant in the ongoing meme warfare across the cyber plains that’s been raging for millions and millions of seconds since I first set up this little shop at this point, become a veteran[2]?
• All those long seconds ago the statistics tell me that I have a brother or sister site out there – set up in the other half of the second when this site cleared some DNS hoop or automated registration hurdle – I wonder what that site is like. And, you know, how they’re doing.

And this is just for blogs - the medium - I haven't even bothered to consider just what's happening to posts - the method. Or to put it another way, there's no possible way they had the Soprano's in the 1950s. Or the Wire. Or Battlestar Galactica. Take your favorite recent TV show and imagine what it would have been like in the age of Uncle Milty and you're getting my picture.

Incidently, CyberJournalism is a great site for tracking the communications evolution as it’s in motion (Well, the latest one, anyways). Always something interesting to read there. Including this story which I could spin into a thread all of its own. The ground trembles when the dinosaurs thrash about in their death throes, doesn’t it? But, take it from me, the ant hive probably doesn’t even notice.


[1] – Someone made the mistake of posting a comment here the other night. Having acquired a new meme or three from that event alone, obviously, I’d say I’m comfortably liquid and starting to turn vast, vast profits. Of the kind I care about at the moment, anyways.

[2] – Again, escaping my google fu but I hold that, just like businesses, those lucky soldiers who survive their first engagement are much more likely to survive the next ones. I’m pretty sure there’s evidence to back this up but I’d like to see
just how long a tail they wag, so to speak.