Like many, I was pretty impressed by Sifry's State of the Blogosphere post this morning. The numbers are ... big. But what do they represent?
As the number of blogs grows, I suspect that the number of noise blogs grows. At 1.2 million posts per day, how many are we able to read?
We see the spikes in this graph that conform to current events, but the ambient noise under the spikes grows as we go along. And perhaps more telling is the length of the conversation.
Look at the Katrina spike. Less than a week of major activity. What would be interesting is to track that conversation arc. How many blogs responded to Katrina? How long did they continue the conversation? What communities were formed and have been maintained?
This is important because blogging and wikis both refer back to Katrina as a measure of our own importance. This chart isn't showing a sustained effort. It shows a clear and alarming spike. As if everyone merely blogged "WOW!" and then went on about their business. And, in this case, their business was roughly half the activity a month before.
Note the huge drop off in blogging surrounding that Katrina spike. Why was everyoen all worked up in summer 05 with a huge drop off at the start of the school year?
It will be interesting to see what this summer looks like. It may end up that most of the blue in that graph are MySpace blogs that react less to Sandy O'Connor and more to how much jeans cost at the Gap.
Technorati Tags: blogs, blogging, sifry, myspace, community_indicators
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