If Blogging is dead, why are you reading this?
In the recent past, many former bloggers have been saying that blogging is dead. They have abandoned the act of blogging and moved on to the greener pastures offered by the likes of Twitter and Facebook. Social Media and mobile are the buzzwords and blogging is old news.
Frankly, I found this to be an absurd notion. Over the December holidays I encountered three people ranging from the ages of 25 to 56 who had just taken up blogging. They weren’t tech-savvy programmers but a lawyer, a student traveller and a house wife.
If they were taking the time to get into blogging, and for no immediate financial gain, surely blogging couldn’t be in it’s death throes. It seemed to me as though the whole “Death of Blogging” thing was nothing more than hype created to get some attention.
But suspecting wasn’t good enough. If I wanted to make a contradictory statement, I needed some proof.
The Quest for Statistics on the State of the South African Blogosphere
Finding any decent information on the South African Blogosphere proved very challenging. I contacted the Letterdash blogging platform – as part of News24 I am convinced that they must have a thriving community of bloggers – but their contact form was non existent with a 500 – Internal Server Error staring me in the face. Local Blog aggregator, Afrigator, also didn’t provide me with the information I needed.
I had no other choice but to turn to our friends, the Americans…
The Stats from the States
At a loss for finding statistics for our local scene, I consulted the excellent Technorati State of the Blogosphere Report published every year. Surely if blogging was in the decline, it would be visible in the USA first.
While this report doesn’t give a definite number to all the bloggers in the world, studying their methodology does yield an insight into the burning question of whether or not blogging is indeed still alive and well, kicking and with a pulse.
Technorati have an Internet survey conducted every year among bloggers nationwide. The survey group was shrunk from 2,828 bloggers in 2009 to 1,091 respondents in 2010.
However, the Report also uses data collected by Lijit, a trusted publisher network of over 12000 publishers and 700 million page views per month.
Lijit-collected data for the 2010 State of the Blogosphere report was from two primary sources.
- 13,000 active Lijit publishers that have the Lijit Search Widget installed on their blog (up from 11000 in 2009)
- The network of 3.8 million blogs that those 13,000 blogs connect to via their Blogroll and other social network connections tracked by Lijit (up from 2.5 million in 2009).
If Lijit could expand their survey group from 2009 to 2010 because they now have a larger pool of active users, then the Lijit data corroborates that Blogging isn’t dead and thriving still.
I’ll state that blogs have come of age. They have been around long enough to be effectively
assimilated by the mainstream. Blogs have gained legitimacy and are read by most internet users every day, in one form of another. The humble blog may not be the hotshot new kid on the block anymore, but it’s here to stay.
As Warren Ellis said in a recent Wired magazine column:
“When any medium starts getting “the death of…” articles, it doesn’t mean the medium in question is dying, so much as that people are bored with it and are looking for the next thing. And while they were looking for other things to be interested in, Chicago street gangs started blogging to protest against police harassment. Remember Blogger‘s original tagline? “Push-button publishing for the people.” That looks alive and well to me.”
Look out for the next post, where I will delve a bit deeper into the findings of the State of the Blogosphere Report and what it says about Microblogging and SEO.
