So, how's the blogosphere doing? MarketingVOX notes:
"The blogosphere is doubling in size every six months and is now 60 times larger than it was three years ago, according to the latest quarterly installment of David Sifry's "State of the Blogosphere" report. He writes that Technorati now tracks over 35.3 Million blogs."
More data, links, and related articles over at MarketingVoX. The good news is, the survey believes that most of the growth is real, not 'splogs' (spammer blogs).
On which topic, blogspot.com owner Google is trying some CAPTCHA techniques to throttle down on the auto-generated blogspot splogs that have led to their domain's blacklisting at sites like Winds of Change.NET et. al. Based on our MT-Blacklist logs (total spams blocked since inception: over 290,000) Google is improving, but isn't quite at the required seriousness level yet.
The Pentagon, on the other hand, is. As is the CIA.
The Pentagon's Defense Science Board will conduct a study this summer on the military implications of Internet search engines, online journals and blogs - see DID's coverage.
And wouldn't you know it, the CIA is in on the act, too... apparently:
"I can't get into detail of what, but I'll just say the amount of open source reporting that goes into the president's daily brief has gone up rather significantly... There has been a real interest at the highest levels of our government, and we've been able to consistently deliver products that are on par with the rest of the intelligence community."
Hmm. Should I be encouraged, or terrified?
Wonder if they also read and acted on ex-CIA employee Celeste Bilby's internal CIA blogging suggestion back in 2004?
I suppose it's too much to hope for JDAMs or covert hit squads targeted at the 100 or so problem children that make up most of the spammer universe....
This is fascinating.
I was doing some research last week on the state of the blogosphere. Does anybody have any links or organizations that keep track of how many people are blogging, number of comments and visitors, etc? I wanted to download some numbers and such but couldn't find much on Google. I know there are sites that come out every so often with a PR report, like this one, but I was looking more to things like weekly or monthly numbers, blogs-by-country, active vs inactive, etc. Something more like census data.
Any help would be appreciated.
How do they know if a site is a blog? How does the site know? How does anyone know?
Technorati hasn't found my bloggish site yet (although it was Farked and BoingBoing'd last week). Is it because it's a daily update? Is it because it's not on blogspot or published using major blog engine software?
Is it because I say it's a blog and it really isn't, or is it because I don't say it's a blog and it really is?
If one collected every single person's blog comments into a single page, some of those "blogs" would be better than most actual blogs...
There are so many conversations, and different types of conversations going on, that it is getting quite impossible to track them all... and yet it feels like the blogging world has a second wind on the way, and maybe one that we can't anticipate. Video? Podcasting? Mobile net consumption? RSS? Another tripling of the audience? Collection, aggregation, ideas flying around at remarkable speeds... the techno-optimist in me says it just seems like there's another shoe to drop. One hopes it's for the best.