ON BLOG WRITERS AND READERS

NEITHER WRITER NOR A READER BE...

The Washington Times has an article titled "30 million blogs and counting..." (via memeorandum), that is another mainstream media piece commenting on the continued growth of blogs, but the seeming dearth of blog readers.  A couple of excerpts:

"Technorati, the search engine that tracks the blogosphere, counts 28.7 million blogs on the Web. But there are indicators the numbers are peaking: The Gallup poll said "the growth in the number of U.S. blog readers was somewhere between nil and negative" during 2005..."

"Writing in Slate, Daniel Gross wonders if the blogosphere may be teetering on its own 1999 -- the year before the tech bubble burst. A recent Gallup poll titled "Blog Readership Bogged Down" showed that only 9 percent of those polled said they regularly read blogs, while 66 percent said they never read them."

First observation, albeit a nitpicking one, is since when does one of the bastions of journalism round up 28.7 million blogs to 30 million for the sake of an eye-catching headline?

That aside, it's a relatively valid question.  Are we reaching the limits of the long tail of blog readers worldwide?  Have we bloggers over-stayed our welcome and stretched their reading attention to the limit?

I mean we're only a planet of some 6.5 billion people after all, of which only a billion or so have internet access.  Surely we're reaching the limits here with 30 million blogs and their readers.  I mean after all when could the other 970 million folks possibly find the time to read 30 million blogs?

Then there's the question of what happens when multi-user blogs become more popular?  As Russell Beattie reports in a timely post today:

"Very cool! Kashif just emailed me about a dev project at Wordpress.org for a multi-user version! That’s pretty awesome - I didn’t know it existed at all! And it looks like it’s stable enough for real use - Blogg.com is claiming 989 blogs at the moment and there’s a bunch of “city blogs” in Australia that are using it as well. This is *very* cool. I especially like how the URLs are automagically made with an extension to the domain name like russell.blogg.com - very clean. And the setup process is all of three fields and an email confirmation."

What happens when one multi-user blog, which will likely be counted as ONE blog, actually has dozens if not hundreds of bloggers adding content?  Won't we further stretch the limits of blog readers' patience worldwide?

And finally, what about the "30" million bloggers themselves?  If their ranks are growing so fast, does it mean that they're just blog creators and NOT blog readers?  And if they ARE blog readers as well, why then, aren't blog readers growing commensurate with blog writers?

Timely questions, don't you think?

Comments

[Zoli Erdos]

I don't believe one would write a blog without having a keen interest in reading others...

Another point is that there are many "accidental" blog readers: they don't have 100's of items in their RSS reader, in fact they probably don't even use a reader, they just performed a keyword search on Google, and some of the articles on the subject matter happen to be blog-posts, whether they realize it or not.

[Brian Phipps]

I think it's a little early in the evolution of blogs to be predicting their peak and decline (though I can see why newspapers might like the idea.) European and Asian blogs are just getting started. Plus, there's still lots of room for hardware innovation that could stimulate blog readership. For example, if someone could develop a lightweight digital reader that could handle blogs, I'd be taking one to the cafe (or to the couch), and increasing my blog readership accordingly.

Here's a different measure: if you were to be marooned on a South Pacific island and allowed 5 publications to read, how many of them would be blogs? For me it would be 2 or 3 out of the five.

[Kir]

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