Why do I blog?
I recently read a post on the Doc Searls weblog that quoted some interesting statistics about blogging. The statistics were from an article by David Sifry called ‘The State of the Live Web”. The article talked about the distinctions between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0. The article was very interesting but what really got my attention was the following statistics.
– 70 million weblogs
– About 120,000 new weblogs each day, or 1.4 new blogs every second.
– 1.5 million posts per day, or 17 posts per second.
– Growing from 35 to 70 million blogs took 320 days.
Amazing statistics to say the least. So what are the chances that anyone is reading this blog? I would guess that I would be lucky if I got a few readers a day. Well let me say first that I know that at least some people are reading this blog. It has only been up for 3 months and I have 22 posts counting this one. So far for all my efforts I have 5 comments. I guess that is not too bad but it is not like I have a huge audience that is anxiously waiting for my next post. So my question is why do I blog? Probably for the same reasons 70 million other people do. Even though I know I will probably never get much of a readership I just plain enjoy doing it. It is a way for me to express myself and basically think out loud. I have a lot of opinions about things and there are a lot of things that interest me that I want to share with other people. Blogging is also a way for me to vent in a useful way. Even if my blogging is the equivalent of standing in the middle of the desert and yelling at the top of my lungs with no one around to hear me, it still makes me feel good. So I will keep on blogging along with the other 70 million bloggers and who knows, maybe my audience will eventually creep into the dozens. If it does I will be very pleased, if it doesn’t I will keep blogging anyway.
Comments
By Doc Searls on April 9th, 2007 at 5:52 pm
Well, this isn’t the desert, and you’re hardly alone. But readers aren’t an “audience” either. Not unless you’re performing as if on stage.
You get writers and readers. Correspondents, in many cases. The sum might go into the hundreds or low thousands. But don’t count on many thousands or millions unless you traffic in porn or popular culture or severe politics or something that makes you a star. (Like, say, Scoble or Reynolds.) If what you like to do is think out loud in a useful and interesting way (which you do), count on peaking in the low thousands. That happened with my blog in 2000, and it’s been about the same ever since.
No complaints, either.
Rock on,
Doc
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