flipthedolphin

Like the Gallup Poll pointed out: Blog Readership Bogged Down.

Gallup’s latest examination of Americans’ online habits finds that one in five Web users read Web-logs, or “blogs,” either frequently or occasionally. Though this translates into 40 million readers, it relegates blogs to the bottom pack of Internet activities, among the 13 for which Gallup recently measured Americans’ use. Like most Web activities, blog readership hasn’t increased over the past year or so, even though Americans are spending more time online.

What’s going on?

Personally I think that the on-going expansion of the blogsphere and the exponential growth of informations (meant as the quantity) is automatically shifting down the readers. Let me be clear: I recently found myself having more than 500 feeds in my reader. What’s the most obvious result then? I don’t read any. Information overload is what we are experiencing right now.

There are tons of blogs and bloggers out there. Dozens of people are creating new blogs right now and there’s nothing you can do about it. They will start talking about their life. Their friends. Their new tech toys. Their anything… and occasionally a great blog will stand out!

There are so many blogs out there that you are missing some vital stuff without even knowing it! I bet!

In a world of over 50,000 postings per hour, and over 70,000 new weblogs created each day, keeping on top of and in tune with the most interesting and influential people and topics is the new frontier beyond search.

State of the Blogosphere, February 2006 Part 2: Beyond Search

and again

New blog creation continues to grow. We currently track over 75,000 new weblogs created every day, which means that on average, a new weblog is created every second of every day - and 13.7 million bloggers are still posting 3 months after their blogs are created. In other words, even though there’s a reasonable amount of tire-kicking going on, blogging is growing as a habitual activity. In October of 2005, when Technorati was only tracking 19 million blogs, about 10.4 million bloggers were still posting 3 months after the creation of their blogs.

State of the Blogosphere, February 2006 Part 1: On Blogosphere Growth

You see: this is pollution.

What’s next?

Blogs don’t die. You create one and it stays there for ages. We should start counting “living” blogs only. Life activity of a blog should be for example how many times per month it has been updated. How many comments a post received. How many inbound links it still have even if it is a dead site… and so on (those are just hints).

I think that blogs will start dying. Eventually we’ll see broken links and similar stuff. Younger people blogging about their new friend met at school will eventually stop blogging by themselve. Older and experienced bloggers will go on accumulating readership while the other “nonsense-sphere” will shrink and readers will have a narrower selection. This will go on shrinking until the blogging trend will start again. And again we’ll see a cycle. New blogs will be spawned. Readership will sink. Crap blogs will die. Readership will grow…

Why there is not a cycle in graphs?

I think that this is still the beginning of the trend. Internet is still spreading all around the world and people are still learning how to surf. The blogsphere will go on growing for a long time to come but since many out there started blogging a while ago, we’re seeing an anticipation of the future: many sites are dead yet.

Free online communities show us that there is an invisible auto-moderation factor: when nonsense stuff is starting to grow and readers are starting to “stop reading”, then the community will automatically die. And eventually start all over again.

The blogsphere is supposed to be just the same.

What Folksonomy can do?

Folksonomy is the big deal. It can help keeping track of interesting stuff. Using services like Digg or del.icio.us can actually help those unknown bloggers to stand out simply by writing something interesting; writing something that people will like to read, tag, comment, rate and share with others. This is essentially the evolution of the good ol’ word of mouth: I see something interesting, I tag/digg it.

Information will be still overwhelming but at least we can try to categorize it and prioritize it. And for God’s sake: stop reading crap only because it’s from a top blogger! It hurts your mind and the blogsphere.

…on the worst of the net

It would be cool to see a sort of top100 “never updated” blogs chart. Also it would be cool to see the top worst blogs… the zombie blogs… and so on :D Just for fun :)