I’ve been thinking about the question “is blogging a fad” for months now. Everytime a journalist asks, which is basically every other day.
Initially my response was “I don’t know” or it was “sure, but that doesn’t mean companies that find value in it won’t keep it up”. And sometimes my response was even longer, like at the Napa NewComm Forum.
Recently I realized that I was thinking of blogging the wrong way. I was thinking of it as a business tool. And all business tools have a fairly finite “hype cycle”. They hit their peak and then they become boutique and niche services.
The problem is that blogging is really a communications medium. Like the letter, the telegraph, the fax, morse code, the phone, email, webpages, SMS, IM and VoIP (to name a few). And the reality is that communucations mediums that hit the mainstream don’t simply die. Heck, they often don’t even evolve beyond their initial state - mainly because it requires upgrading every user to do so. It took 20 years to go from analog phones to digital, for example.
Communications mediums are generally fairly static and stagnant. They don’t really die, they simply get replaced. Smoke signals replaced by morse code, replaced by fax, replaced by email. Or something.
Blogging has now established itself as a mainstream communications medium. Roughly 50 million bloggers. More than 200 million blog readers. That’s more users than Linux, more than Apple, more than the iPod, more than most major religions, more than the number of day traders, firemen, lawyers and doctors.
Anyone who wants to say blogging is only for a “select few” is looking through a very different kind of glasses. And those glasses probably don’t allow them to see blogging in relationship to their favourite little pet project - be it open source software like Firefox and Linux or cool services like Skype and Vonage.
The numbers behind blogging are huge. I don’t say this to navel gaze, but just to say that from my perspective it’s mainstream. When I can be in a taxicab in San Francisco and ask the driver if he knows about blogs, and get a knowing nod…
Yes, blogs are mainstream.
And mainstream communications mediums don’t die out. They stagnate, or they evolve or they get replaced by something that does the same thing only better. Because the reality is that once people learn to connect in a new and meaningful way they are loathe to let go of it.
#1 by Darren - March 8th, 2005 at 12:35
Because I’m a pedant: those numbers put blogs (writers plus readers) at #6 on the world religion list.
#2 by Jeremy C. Wright - March 8th, 2005 at 12:37
Okay, so only another 100 million to beat the Buddhists. Go us go!
#3 by lsantos - March 8th, 2005 at 18:43
I would very much appreciate if you could tell me wher you got the 50M / 200M figures.
Thank you.
#4 by BlogCruiser - March 8th, 2005 at 22:19
I hope you don’t mind me adding a little spin or twist to your blog opinions, ideas and thoughts here. I agree with you blogs are communication on the internet. This is the way I’ve kind of always looked at blogs. Since they have been tagged with the technobabble phrases, jargon or buzz words that companies, groups, industries and governments love to tag things with. Marketing mania seems to work well give air a new name and whoosh maybe we can package and sell it to make profits from something that already exists. Ok, enough of my industry bashing; they do a lot of good things too. Blogs have been around a long time on the internet. They just weren’t called blogs. It’s been difficult actually pinning down a real definition of a blog because it is communication via the internet and that is what it seems to boil down too. We like to define things and it helps communication by doing so. However, at the same time it restricts things too. So we come up with more new names and tags of other items as they evolve from what is happening. Some one just wanted to give this communication a name and it seems to have worked; even though there are many opinions as to what a blog is and the final reality of what a blog really is or has evolved to be has not been made absolute at this point in my opinion. Call it a web page with a content management system a blog. Freelance journalism and publishing to the web can be called a blog. Someone writing and publishing a dairy call it a blog. Someone else keeping a business ezine online could call it a blog. Updates to published company happenings can be called a blog. Other themed and dated hobby info can be called a blog. A community of people discussing and chatting in a chronological order could be called a blog too. I’m sure I could add a hundred more ideas for blogs that may fit. The real way to possibly define a blog might be people publishing their communications on the internet. It’s almost seems silly all the huff and puff about blogs they are an evolving communications on the internet. I don’t even know if we can call it a tool for sure I guess we can if we want. Mostly up to the masses if they take to it, which they apparently have. Now, I guess they will become what ever the dictionary decides them to be. Ok, enough of my bloggity, blog, blah and ranting and rambling almost nonsensically but I’m now published on a blog. “Main stream media vs. bloggers” I still have a hard time getting over a statement like that when neither really exist as any entity except maybe as smaller organized groups of a whole. I like how some one put it on one blog I read, “Old media vs. Blogger not Mainstream Media”. That has a ring to it anyway. Oh well I think I typed I was going to stop my rambling and I guess it’s time to follow that lead. Keep up the great blog by the way! Ooops, I mean communication…:) I also agree blogging is in no way a fad. I remember the days of “computers” being called a fad. Computers have been a long lasting fad if that is the case.
I guess rambling and ranting were just in my blood this evening…I hope you don’t mind… but I guess that is what the delete button is for if you do…
#5 by Jules - March 9th, 2005 at 00:45
Blogs won’t die, because even if all the news in the world dries up, we’ll always be able to blog about blogging.
#6 by Matt Thornton - March 9th, 2005 at 07:51
Yeh, I’d like to know the source of the stats too. I found this: http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm which, by Jer’s calculations, would say 1 in 8 people have a blog. 1 in 4 regularly read a blog.
Dunno.
#7 by BlogCruiser - March 9th, 2005 at 21:22
Matt Thornton,
I think with the stats you presented it comes out closer to 1 out of 138 have a blog and 1 out of 32 people read blogs. Then I can be pretty bad at math though…
#8 by Matt Thornton - March 10th, 2005 at 04:08
200m (Jer’s claimed figure) out of 800m internet users is 25%. Actually my figure for people who have a blog was wrong, 50m of 800m is actually 6%.
#9 by Jeremy C. Wright - March 10th, 2005 at 12:04
Which stat? Number of blogs or number of readers?
In America: http://www.pewinternet.org/PPF/r/144/report_display.asp
Almost 38% of Americans read blogs. That’s, what, 120 million? I don’t know, but it’s at least half of my “200 million” number.
American blogging only accounts for about 20% of blogging. Does the number of readers scale? I don’t have firm non-US stats for readers, but I do for writers.
There are more than 30 million bloggers in Asia (just according to the major services), and there are at least 15 million bloggers in south america that aren’t being counted either. There are several south american sites that have 10 million readers for the blogs.
I’d say 50 million / 200 million would be a conservative number.