As Blogger nears it’s tenth birthday the Blogger team has published some interesting data:
- Every minute of every day, 270,000 words are written on Blogger
- Millions of people worldwide use Blogger to publish to their blog each week
- Almost two thirds of Blogger’s traffic comes from outside North America (What’s the #2 country after the U.S.? Brazil, followed by Turkey, Spain, Canada, and the U.K.)
- The most popular sport for our bloggers? Soccer (that’s football to the rest of the world), more than four times larger than the #2 sport, baseball
While the team at Techcrunch a comparison with other blog platforms and Twitter published (see graphic below), the real question to ask here is in how far Facebook a blogging platform has become for many people.
Like many people I started blogging on Blogger and moved then to a self-hosted WordPress setup but would not set up a personal blog anymore in 2009. Facebook and Twitter certainly have filled in the need for a personal blog for me. Like Paul Boutin says:
Writing a weblog today isn’t the bright idea it was four years ago. The blogosphere, once a freshwater oasis of folksy self-expression and clever thought, has been flooded by a tsunami of paid bilge. Cut-rate journalists and underground marketing campaigns now drown out the authentic voices of amateur wordsmiths. It’s almost impossible to get noticed, except by hecklers. And why bother? The time it takes to craft sharp, witty blog prose is better spent expressing yourself on Flickr, Facebook, or Twitter.
There is no doubt that Google made a great decision purchasing Blogger, especially considered the amount of Adsense ads the Blogger platform runs, but the biggest question is if blogs will continue to grow perpetuously or if there will be a new shift towards bigger CMS platforms now new media companies such as B5Media Inc. are integrating forums as well on their main blogs.
What is a blog? The line is blurred and we have seen many sites evolve from ‘blog’ to multi-authored magazines. I, for one, am looking forward to read the next State of the Blogosphere at Technorati. You can read the 2008 State of the Blogosphere here.
Originally posted on June 19, 2009 @ 12:07 pm