Dave Pollard's environmental philosophy, creative works, business papers and essays.



October 2005
Sun Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat
            1
2 3 4 5 6 7 8
9 10 11 12 13 14 15
16 17 18 19 20 21 22
23 24 25 26 27 28 29
30 31          
Sep   Nov


leafMADE IN CANADA

leaf trust your instincts



< £ Salon Bloggers & >





Click here to send an email to the editor of this weblog.

 

 

  October 27, 2005

The Span and Influence of the Blogosphere in 2010
BlogProj1
BlogProj2
The Technorati blog has been publishing a lot of data lately on the state of the blogosphere. Some of the data defy projection (if the number of blogs continues to double every five months, for example, in five years there will be 60 billion blogs) but others paint an interesting picture of the blogosphere's span and influence. In some cases I've had to make some assumptions, and some of the data is soft (and projections must always be taken with a grain of salt) but I think the following projections are accurate and plausible.
  1. By 2010, the blogosphere will be read in aggregate as much as the American press. Some earlier research suggested that aggregate readership of all blogs is about 1 million hours per day. Technorati data say posting volume is roughly doubling each year, and that reader attention is growing modestly (20%) slower than that, and you get the blue curve above. Other data from Readership Institute and Encarta suggest readers of the 1500 US dailies currently spend an aggregate of 25 million hours per day reading them, but this number is in a steady long term decline (red line above). The lines cross in 2010.
  2. We will have to produce 30 times as much as the American press, to get the same readership. From a straw poll of three dailies, it appears to me that the average US daily includes about 70 articles and columns. Computerworld and other sources say the average newspaper article is 700 words. Multiply that 50,000 words/newspaper/day x 1500 dailies and you get 75 million words/day. Divided into 25 million hours of reading time that's 20 minutes reader attention per word. Let's say the average blog post is 150 words (my average is 1200 words, but I'm far from typical, and some posts are nothing more than a sentence with a link). Technorati reports an average (excluding spam) of 700,000 posts/day on the blogosphere. That would make 100 million words/day. Divide that into the 1 million hours of reading time, that's 36 seconds reader attention per word. That's 3% of what the average print word gets. It also means that to catch up to the dailies in aggregate reader attention in 2010 we'll be writing 30 times as many words as they are -- that's about three billion words per day. 
  3. Even if current growth continues, by 2010 less than 1% of the world will be active bloggers. By 'active' I mean bloggers who usually post at least once per week. If you apply a power curve, about three quarters of the five million blog posts per week are posted by somewhere between one and two million 'active' bloggers. Let's be generous and say two million. If this continues to double annually until 2010 that will produce 60 million active bloggers. That's less than 1% of the world's population. Compare that to many other global activities and blogging will still be a fairly uncommon practice. Yoga, for example, has several times this number of practitioners.
That's us bloggers: increasingly influential, hard-working and still rare. Like progressive economists, and members of intentional communities.

6:35:56 PM  trackback []  comment []

Click here to visit the Radio UserLand website. © Copyright 2005 Dave Pollard.
Last update: 01/11/2005; 5:26:35 PM.



SEARCH SITE
How to Save the World



leaf THINKING OF MOVING TO CANADA?
(immigration info blog)

Technorati Cosmos


Click to see the XML version of this web page.

Subscribe to this blog by
Add to My Yahoo!

.
.
.
.
.


Subscribe to "How to Save the World" in Radio UserLand.

Click to see the XML version of this web page.





WHAT THE BLOGOSPHERE WANTS MORE OF
Blog readers want to see more:
  1. original research, surveys etc.
  2. original, well-crafted fiction
  3. great finds: resources, blogs, essays, artistic works
  4. news not found anywhere else
  5. category killers: aggregators that capture the best of many blogs/feeds, so they need not be read individually
  6. clever, concise political opinion (most readers prefer these consistent with their own views)
  7. benchmarks, quantitative analysis
  8. personal stories, experiences, lessons learned
  9. first-hand accounts
  10. live reports from events
  11. insight: leading-edge thinking & novel perspectives
  12. short educational pieces
  13. relevant "aha" graphics
  14. great photos
  15. useful tools and checklists
  16. précis, summaries, reviews and other time-savers
  17. fun stuff: quizzes, self-evaluations, other interactive content

Blog writers want to see more:
  1. constructive criticism, reaction, feedback
  2. 'thank you' comments, and why readers liked their post
  3. requests for future posts on specific subjects
  4. foundation articles: posts that writers can build on, on their own blogs
  5. reading lists/aggregations of material on specific, leading-edge subjects that writers can use as resource material
  6. wonderful examples of writing of a particular genre, that they can learn from
  7. comments that engender lively discussion
  8. guidance on how to write in the strange world of weblogs


Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.