The Blogosphere is Not Dead. So What’s Really Happening?

Who Killed The Blogosphere? Thats the title of a new piece by Nicholas Carr that examines the seeming decline in the number of actively updated blogs since Technorati started keeping statistics in 2002:

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.

133 million blogs? That’s the experimental phase. New technologies go through a normal phase where many people try it out, but only a fraction of those find enough value, motivation, benefit, etc. to keep at it.

7.4 million and 1.5 million? Frankly, that sounds much more digestible than 133 million. Every time Technorati released those “state of the blogosphere” reports showing ever-growing numbers of new bloggers, I immediately took them with a grain of salt and assumed that the numbers would eventually drop. Lamenting the “end of the blogosphere” is really just marking the end of a phase in its evolution.

Two comments on Nick’s post stood out for me. Joe Duck says:

Nope. The rumors of the death of the blogosphere are … greatly exaggerated. Ironically the medium is still improving, but not in the structured way articulate folks often prefer. Rather we see regular folks sharing their observations, sometimes in inspired ways but often just as part of a growing amateur and untuned symphony of insights. The good stuff is now distributed across such a large space and within massive comment streams that we need to build better blog search rather than a big blog mortuary.

Claire Giordano says:

Individual voices continue to thrive, some with audiences in the tens of thousands, like Tim Bray, and some more modest in readership, like me. The blogosphere is no longer the exclusive domain of the early adopters, but that doesn’t mean the value has gone away. It means you have to look beyond the popular blogs, beyond the Technorati 100, to find the individual voices, and to see the value the individual bloggers are adding to the conversation.

I still like blogging. After more than three years writing this blog (somehow it completely slipped my mind on October 24 that I’d hit the three year mark), I think it’s more valuable than ever. As I wrote in a post in July, the value for me is in the community:

I like having a community here that I can share my ideas with, learn from your comments & posts, and share a common interest in wikis, their many uses in organizations, and strategies for effectively growing use.