Blogging in the media.

Having taken a few days off over Easter, it seemed that every time I opened the paper (well, the Guardian at least!), something about blogs was there! There was the review of the first 10 years of blogs According to Johnson, the first post was “Check this out. Amazing!” on Scripting News.
Blood, in The Weblog handbook, puts the starting point in June 1993 (Mosaic’s What’s New Page), with Bogart’s “News, Pointers and Commentary” in Feb 1997, and Winer’s Scripting News as the “third” entry – in April 2007.
Next came the “Blogging code of Conduct”, proposed by Tim O’Reilly and Jimmy Wales. Somewhat predictably, a proportion of the blogosphere reacted to this; however, looking at the code, it’s pretty much what one would expect from educational blogging.
Finally, on Thursday, they had a summary of Technorati’s review of the Blogosphere – which I’ve already blogged about. A couple of points are raised, perhaps a little unfairly. Keegan points out that of the 70m blogs, only 24m are in English – there are more in Japanese than any other language. He also mentions the fact that some 65,000 videos are uploaded to YouTube daily – though neither how many users YouTube has, nor how many blog posts are created daily. He goes on to add that MySpace has round 170m users (a figure backed up by an article at the end of March, adding that most users have a blog. Surely all that indicates is that MySpace users have blogs, but most aren’t linked to Technorati. Clearly Technorati only list the blogs that are submitted to them. The fact, as Keegan points out, (as I mentioned before), that Technorati is noting a slow down of new listings could simply indicate that fewer users are registering their blogs with Technorati. In order to have a true picture of the number of blogs (in particular active blogs, but discounting splogs) we need to look not only at Technorati registrations – but also at MySpace, and all the other sites where blogs are found. A difficult task! Sites like Technorati do at least give us a starting point