Wired has this week published an excellent essay about the changes we have seen in the blogosphere in recent years, with the central premise being that the blog is now ‘dead’. That is to say that the time of true blogging, in the sense of a DIY non-commercial method of mass communication that offered the levelest playing field for all voices alike, has well and truly passed.
The Times online responded with the more moderate view that blogging has merely changed, though this view seems a little superficial when one considers the degree of fundamental difference between modern web 2.0 blogging - and the ‘old school’ approach of four or five years ago.
Blogging is one of the most significant sectors of user created content on the web today. Starting a blog is as easy as opening a Hotmail account, and most web users have access to at least one blogging outlet - be it through a social networking profile, a blogging forum, or perhaps even a personal blog page. What is significant is the rate at which the volume of this content is increasing - far more quickly than people are uploading videos to Youtube, or indeed any other form of user published content. The numbers sum up the situation pretty clearly: 175,000 new blogs launched every day, 1.6 million total blog posts daily (equating to 18 updates per second), and over 200 million total blogs - not counting MySpace and other social networking profile blogs. Question is: how to find and keep up to date with quality and relevant content, without spending every waking minute drowning in the endless sea of constant posts? Well, luckily for us Technorati has a solution…
