The rumours of the death of the blogosphere are … perhaps greatly exaggerated

Nicholas Carr states that;

Technorati has identified 133 million blogs since it started indexing them in 2002. But at least 94 percent of them have gone dormant, the company reports in its most recent “state of the blogosphere” study. Only 7.4 million blogs had any postings in the last 120 days, and only 1.5 million had any postings in the last seven days.

Wow.  I’m amazed.  1.5 million blogs (not bloggers), globally.

A sizeable crowd are saying blogging is mainstream.  And dead.  And yet there are only 1.5 million regularly updated blogs. Strikes me that the problem is not ‘blogging being mainstream’, but finding the good stuff between the professional blogs and the drivel.

26/11/08 Update: This is a good perspective too.

Please help

Sport Relief

(I should apologise for bringing you here by illicit categorisation and tagging, but I won’t. You might have wasted just 10 seconds. Hopefully you will make the choice to change someone’s world in less than a minute).

Lazysphere. An Idea spreading fast

I really didn’t know whether to write this. But ho-hum. Here goes….

On his blog Micro Persuasion, Steve Rubel explores technology and its impact on marketing communications. One of his posts The Lazysphere and the Decline of Deep Blogging has really struck a cord with bloggers, journalists and online observers. And me.

The essence of his original post is that the lazysphere is a group of bloggers who, “rather than create new ideas or pen thoughtful essays, simply glom on to the latest news with another “me too” blog post.”

Shortly after his post was made on the 8th January, there were just 10 Google search results.

Today, 13 days later there are 10700.

10700 bloggers, journalists onlookers “regurgitating the story over and over again” at various levels and with varying intellectual input.

Amazing stuff.

It just goes to show how a new phrase, and a new idea can grow exponentially. But, and it’s a big ‘but’, according to Rubel there has to be “value add”.

I’ll leave that up to you to think about. Frankly I am amazed that lazysphere.co.uk and .com remain available at the time of writing, and if I’ve passed the thought onto someone new that is enough for me!