Steven Rubel aggregates a lot of data to suggest that blogging is slowing down, let alone maturing. I think that he raises a lot of great arguments. One thing I see, “from the trenches,” so to speak, is that the numbers are misleading.
Here is why:
My older brother began blogging back in 2002. He sent me a link to Blogger and to his blog, and frankly, as much as I am an open person, I thought the idea was vain. Of course, I was intrigued with blogging technology. In my 2003 evaluation, I encouraged my then-boss and company President to deploy blogging tools to improve our efficiency. Like many other things, he did not exactly listen to me.
I began blogging back in June 2004, using a Blogger account. Here is the link to that blog and here is the first post. That blog was more of a “knowledge base” for me to keep items I needed to go back to, or wanted to go back to. Incidentally, I stopped blogging after IGN bought my then-company. My last post on that blog was June 1st 2005, when the deal was announced. I do not think it was because I was now employed by a large company, but I wanted to fit in and not be a problem, and I thought keeping a blog might not be kosher in their eyes. And I was right, because within a month they told me “don’t talk to the press,” even though I was getting media mentions for our company.
All to say, clearly I missed blogging it, whatever blogging entailed. In January 2006, after I was kicked out of IGN (who by January 2006 was part of News Corp.), I had to start anew. As I have mentioned on this blog previously, one of my brilliant programmers suggested that we get bloggers to feature our domain-specific, vertical search engines (MetaMojo.com) on their blogs. So say a guy blogs on music, we’d get him to feature our music search engine. The results were relevant, but I was not sure that a random blogger would want to feature our search engine when Google and Yahoo! were readily available for mass web search and they could throw money at them.
Since I was really missing the dynamic and timely nature of blogs, I decided to dive in. But instead of launching one blog, I decided to launch ten blogs, called the Blogger Mojo network, which was the news and publishing pillar of the Mojo Supreme network. I’ve written previously about the method to the madness of Blogger Mojo here. I have added to it by coining the term “vested journalism” as a description of what it is here.
The point I am trying to make is this: I was one guy, the same guy, who in the space of 18 months (between June 2004 and January 2006) launched 11 blogs. I was not 11 bloggers, I was one and the same. The likelihood of me adding 11 more blogs in the next 18 months are slim. Well, actually, being somewhat maniacal, we just launched five more blogs this past week and will have 20 in all by the one-year anniversary of the launch of the blogs, which is end of January.
But as you can see, for most sane people, they might have signed up to one blog, on Blogger.com, for example, and then signed up to another one on WordPress, or TypePad… this “double signup” inflates the numbers.
To conclude, the number of bloggers will continue to increase, but for the reasons we’ve outlined above, the number of blogs should “normalize.”
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