A headline in The Register caught my eye yesterday – “Blog refuseniks facing the sack?“. It was actually looking at ‘compulsory’ blogging by marketing staff etc., at Sony:
“If you don’t blog, it’s going to be frowned upon. Ged has made it clear that staff are expected to blog and participate in the community. He sees it as part of people’s jobs.”
One point that caught my eye was a prediction from the Gartner group:
blogging peaked last October, and of the 100 million active bloggers manning the keyboards this year, the figure will eventually fall to 30 million.
I also skim read something the other day (I thought I’d bookmarked it, but clearly not!) suggesting that CIOs are more likely to support the use of wikis within companies for the development of resources, than they are to support the use of blogging. As far as I can remember, the article didn’t state if these were outward facing, or purely internal uses of blogs/wikis. If anyone else can locate that report …
It then struck me that I wasn’t really sure what the current number of blogs is; good luck was on my side, as Technorati have just released their newest set of stats today! Sifrys Alerts. This would seem to suggest a slight slow down in the creation of new blogs (though it should be noted that this is only blogs that register on Technorati – and also that they’re getting better at removing “splogs” (spam-blogs).
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no, this year, out of the top 100 media websites, 22 were blogs, up for 12 in the year perviously. check engadget for instance.
Wow! This is great information. Compulsory blogging! A whole new thing to throw into the discussion about 21st century skills!
Sam,
I’d be interested to know how many of the top 100 media websites that you mention are newcomers, and how many are existing sites.
The data from technorati suggested that it was the rate at which new blogs were being created was slowing, it would be possible to have a continuing growth in popularity of existing blogs, while at the same time a decline in the numbers being created (that are registering at technorati at any rate)
Vicki
Part of me thought it’s good to have compulsory blogging, but, if it’s done through the marketing department, I wonder how must freedom they’ll have about what they write…