On Blogging

So...here goes. My first foray into the blogging world. What number am I? How many bloggers exist? Let me go google that...

A blogger at blogit.com has the same question:

How many bloggers ARE there?
Does anyone really know?

Blogit's answer: We have thousands of members; we do not provide exact numbers for competitive reasons. Posted by BlogitStaff-Becky on December 5, 2004 at 6:17 AM

Now what competitive reason could Blogit have for not sharing how many bloggers they have?
Is it little fish syndrome? They want to appear big, so they can't admit they're actually pretty small? I have no clue about blogit. Haven't done a websearch of them (and probably won't). But in my own new blogging opinion, they're not doing themselves any pr favors by avoiding the question this way. No offense Becky.

I read more search results:

Technorati tracks over 3.5 million blogs worldwide, up from about 100,000 two years ago. The Pew Internet study estimates that 11% of adult U.S. Internet users regularly read blogs. A new weblog is created every 5.8 seconds, resulting in about 15,000 new blogs a day. Most bloggers update their weblogs regularly: there are about 275,000 posts daily, or about 10,800 blog updates an hour.

These statistics appear to be, while no publish date is available, fairly recent. So, it looks like my little blog is one of some 15,000 that were created just today. A very small fish in a very big ocean here.

Here are some interesting thoughts and blog stats from a blogger in Australia:
from:
Have you ever wondered how far this blogging thing has extended? How many bloggers are there? Where are they from?

Blogcount attempts to answer some of these questions and more. The results are staggering....here's a taste.

Blogger alone has 1.5million registered users. Their number of users grew 14% in the 60 days after 11 March!

Blogstreet's list of blogs grew 27% in a similar period and Technorati tripled the number of blogs it watched in a recent two month period.

Live Journal has 1,090,084 total accounts, with over half of them presently active. Of these 62.2% are Female users and 37.4% are male! (which is pretty different to the God Blog Gender Survey that I did where I found that at least 54% of Christian bloggers were Male!)

18 year olds are the biggest users at Live Journal, most seem to fall between the age of 15 and 25 years old.

The median update rate of weblogs.com pingers is every three days.

Poland now has 100,000 blogs, again 62% are written by women, 75% are under 20 years old.

Iran has 12,000 blogs, but here 76% are male.

During the recent War, 4% of Americans got their war coverage from Weblogs.

This Site has crawled 437,986 blogs. In that list 205,898 are written in English. After that the most popular languages were Portuguese, Polish, Farsi, Spanish, German, Italian, French and Icelandic(in that order). 101,831 are hosted with Blogspot, 14,841 are with MT, 14,172 are with Pitas and 13,106 are with Blogger.

Wow - those are some amazing statistics....the amount of data that is flying around the net purely from blogs is massive. You've got to wonder how useful a lot of the data is, and what impact so many people putting their ideas, dreams, feelings etc out into the datasphere is having on our crazy little world!?

I didn't intend to center my first blog on blogging. But it's interesting stuff. Technorati shares its opinion on the amount of data-blogging flying around the net:

The power of weblogs is that they allow millions of people to easily publish their ideas, and millions more to comment on them. Blogs are a fluid, dynamic medium, more akin to a “conversation” than to a library (which is how the Web has often been described in the past). With an increasing number of people reading, writing, and commenting on blogs, the way we use the Web is shifting in a fundamental way. Instead of primarily being passive consumers of information, more and more Internet users are becoming active participants and creators of content. Weblogs allow everyone to have a voice.

And it's high time everyone recognized the power of their voice, no matter how small it may seem in the larger sea of things. We just never know when that one small thing we say, or do, or write, or share, might be the thing that makes a difference somewhere.

In the web article Digital Media and the Internet: The Question of Utopia Amanda Griscom writes:

...today's digital utopia has been given a space to grow that's far bigger than a painter's canvas and more substantive than the imagination. As of now --- and only the cornerstones have been lain --- it's a horizontally distributed (anti-hierarchical) network of computers within which millions of people can actually communicate and travel and make money and meet friends and buy products and argue and pray and develop communities. The utopia that we are (perhaps inadvertently) attempting to construct in cyberspace seems to satisfy the utopian ideals that have been hovering above Western civilization since ancient Greece.

Gotta love the "anti-hierarchical" part.

We're talking here about the power we as individuals have to shape the world together.

We must not, in trying to think about how we can make a big difference, ignore the small daily differences we can make which, over time, add up to big differences that we often cannot foresee.--Marian Wright Edelman

I like to believe in the hundredth monkey principle. Or in this case, the millionth blogger principle.

We all have a voice. Thank you blogspot, blogit, blogstreet, and a multitude of other websites that host the many independent, thoughtful, maddening, enlightening, and thought provoking words of we the people. It's a difference we make, that we may not yet foresee, and which is changing the world--one word at a time. I feel privileged to be a part of it (no matter how small, and seemingly irrelevant that part may appear to be).

So, this ends my first blog. Not sure if I've done it "right." Been struggling with pasting links and quotes, moving back and forth, saving drafts, coping with a mini crash, using the spellchecker, etc. But, it's a start. Looking forward to more time spent here.