Some time ago, I read an article about blogging and there were some interesting numbers listed there. The article stated that Technorati, a search engine that monitors blogs, indexed around 150 million blogs, up from 100,000 just a few years ago. It seems that a new blog is created every few seconds, which adds up to thousands new blogs a day, hundreds of thousands of posts a day, and thousands of updates an hour. As you see, the growth rate of blogs is really impressive. But what are really blogs? I think that blogs are lowering the cost of publishing, enabling the rise of content, which is replacing the centralized, controlled content done by professionals. I am not saying that some bloggers do not go pro, but most bloggers are only blogging part-time. Blogs are becoming more and more popular with each passing day. One of the reasons is that very often bloggers allow their visitors to ask them questions, leave comments, etc. A user that visits a blog can actually interact with the writer and that is not possible in case of newspapers.
The article had the conclusion that blogging is still in its early days and it is analogous to where the Web was in 1995 and 1996, so it is not clear how it will turn out. However, as a blogger myself, I am predicting that the popularity of blogging will not cease to grow and some bloggers will become even more influential.
