The Blogosphere....Growing Exponentially!

As I was recently perusing my feeds I came upon an incredibly interesting article on ClickZ Stats discussing the growth of the blogosphere since its creation three years ago. The article discusses the findings of Technorati, which is a real-time search engine that keeps track of what is going on in the blogosphere. Specifically, Technorati tracks over 36.4 million sites and 2.3 billion links and is therefore an authority figure in the blogosphere.

In Technorati's State of the Blogosphere Address for April 2006 the company releases incredible findings on the growth of the blogosphere. First off, Technorati found that the blogosphere doubles in size every six months, and has become over sixty times bigger than it was three years ago. Additionally, there are currently 35.3 million weblogs with 75,000 new blogs being created each day. These facts boggle my mind and make me feel extremely 'out of the loop' considering that I didn't really understand the concept of the blogosphere until this semester. Before reading these facts, I thought I was fairly saavy when it came to technology, but now I see that I am definitely not in the first user category, and am more of a laggard when it comes to starting versus following trends.

Technorati includes other facts and figures that lead me to highly doubt what some critics say about the blogosphere becoming too crowded and eventually losing momentum. Technorati found that 55% of the 19.4 million bloggers still maintain blogs with new posts after three months of blogging and that about 3.9 million bloggers update their blogs weekly (our class composing 32 of those 3.9 million in a 'perfect' world). I feel as though if the blogosphere was really being negatively effected by the so-called clutter, these numbers would not be nearly as high or would show negative trends. The fact that so many individuals are creating blogs and staying committed to making entries demonstrates that people are recognizing and experiencing the value of the blogosphere and are becoming dedicated to contributing to it.

After learning firsthand about the value of blogs this semester, I plan on attempting to implement a blogging strategy at my internship this summer at Amelia Island Plantation, a resort island off the coast of Jacksonville, Florida. Considering that my internship is in the Real Estate Marketing department, I feel as though a blog discussing new properties and the overall quality of life on Amelia Island would effectively generate discussion and draw some potential home buyers to look at our properties (pending my ability to acquire sufficient Google Juice). Additionally, I plan on creating a personal blog that tracks my experiences on the island considering I will be away from my friends and family during this time and want some way to converse with them and let them know about my adventure. I plan on posting my pictures, and basically letting them know how my life is going.

Seeing how much I have become a fan of blogging leads me to pretty easily understand how the blogosphere is able to double in size every six months. However, I found Technorati's facts and figures to be very interesting and am happy that hard evidence supports the fact that blogging is a force that is here to stay for a long time.

Happy Blogging to All!