And why should we care? I’ll leave this question for later and take a look at some numbers
There have been quite a few attempts to measure the growth of blogging. As this site devoted to the topic notes, Technorati passed its 4 millionth blog a week ago. Both Blogger and Livejournal claim over 1.5 million users, and a broadly similar estimate can be obtained if we take this Pew Study from 2003 and make the reasonable assumption that numbers are doubling annually.
But these are almost certainly overestimates.
There are heaps of dead blogs out there (thanks to changes in technology, hosting problems and so on, I’m already on my fourth). I prefer to start with another Technorati estimate, that there are about 275,000 posts daily. If you suppose (fairly arbitrarily, but consistent with the Pew data) that the average active blog has one post every three days, that would make around 800 000 blogs.
Another way of looking at things is to consider the labour input going into blogs. If you suppose that the average blog post takes an hour to prepare (this includes overheads like research, if any, site maintenance, responses to comments and so on), 275,000 posts per day amounts to about 100 million hours per year, equivalent to the work of around 50 000 full-time, full year workers. As a comparison, the US Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that news analysts, reporters, and correspondents held about 66,000 jobs in 2002.
There’s not much direct financial return to all this effort. There are a handful of bloggers who’ve been employed as journalists, and vice versa. Add in all the tip jars, Amazon referrals, blogads and so on, and there might be enough money to pay wages for a hundred people, spread across many thousands of tiny payments. Turning to blogging software, I don’t know how many people are employed by Blogger, Six Apart and so on, but it can’t be very many[1].
I suspect though, that the economic impact of activities like blogging is significant and growing. Throughout the history of the Internet, most of the innovation has come as a by-product of efforts to facilitate communication within social groups of various kinds (academics, bloggers, peer-to-peer file sharing), rather than as the result of profit-oriented investment. Rather than taking the lead, the business and government sectors have adopted innovations developed in Internet communities, and realised significant productivity gains as a result.
An economy in which innovation is, to a significant extent, a by-product of activities associated with the creation of social capital will have very different properties from those traditionally considered by economists. Some of these issues have been discussed in terms of notions like “gift exchange” but, for reasons I hope to develop in later posts, I don’t think this provides an adequate account of what’s going on here.
1. To get a complete analysis, it would be necessary to look at web hosting services, ISPs and so on, but imputing a share of this sector to blogs would be an impossible task.
John Quiggin 
? overestimate? based on what numerical data since to otherwise is sheer numerology
According to a press release, 11% of American internet users are blog readers – which adds up to thirteen million people. (I’ll go with this but it sounds very high).
From memory, a couple of 2003 studies suggested that around two thirds of all blogs are written by teenage girls who post rarely. Often they (the blogs, not the angsting teens) die after a couple of months.
The point really is that blogging is not a single coherent activity but many. People diarise or talk to their families. They follow obsessions like sport and music. They try to be funny and construct cheery personas for themselves stumbling through life’s little jokes. Some of them are funny. Genuinely hilarious.
Then there’s the mainlining political or academic bloggers like Quiggin, Chris Sheils and Tim Dunlop, perhaps in groups like Crooked Timber. When you add the work done by the blogger and the comments, this can add up to significant work for each post.
Why am I saying this? Only really to say that most discussions muddy the waters by not making these distinctions. It is these high impact genuine content blogs that make the difference and attract a significant amount of the 13 mill traffic (in the US context, of course..)
I presume the other popular group is the link collectors, who harvest URLS and articles and direct traffic, with perhaps a bit of added value in some introductory remarks. I bet the big ones like Fark are huge.
Please do talk about the gift giving/volunteerism level. It is truly extraordinary.
Granting all of the estimates, I think this line is misleading:
Most blogging isn’t anything like journalism, or like a job for that matter. A whole lot of it, that is, is like this:
A valid blogging activity to be sure, but not much like journalism.
Then there are what may be termed fake or pseudo blogsites such as Cliffs ESP Experiment site at http://sprott.physics.wisc.edu/pickover/esp.html
You might like to try it and be amazed and nonplussed like all the commenters at how he does it. Of course if the Observa can work it out as you should quite easily, then it’s fair to say that the comments section has been carefully edited to hide the obvious answer that Cliff really wants the crystal set to buy his books. Cliff may not be fibbing when he posts a number of comments, but he is pulling your leg by not posting any commenter who has the answer for you.
I’ll call on the rational skeptics who twig the simple explanation of this example of ESP to post ‘yes’ here and we’ll put the rest out of their their amazement in due course. Yes!
“A valid blogging activity to be sure, but not much like journalism.”
Have you read the New Idea lately ?
But I agree that the teen diary blogosphere is for most purposes a separate universe. I’m not sure to what extent it’s represented in Technorati
And over at Public Opinion, Gary racks up the statistics by keeping it simple and non-controversial here at http://www.sauer-thompson.com/archives/opinion/002355.php#002355
zwichenzug wrote;
Most blogging isn’t anything like journalism, or like a job for that matter
But the sites that get above daily inference, trolling, link aggregation or a quote with two sentences around it are fantastic.
kuro5hin.org for all its ups and downs in the last several years has still maintained a high article quality; and this through people posting articles to it off their own back and then having the community vote on it to determine if it is published.
Many of these authors would not have had a voice through mass media controlled sources. The value of the internet is that it democracizes information and allows the consumers to determine quality rather than the owners of mass media.
Bill Ives the Guru of KM and Portals also touched on this subject and linked two days ago to a very impressive site Blog Census [One and all Australian bloggers who are linked by Ken Parish are being tracked]
Unfortunaltely, the same fact cannot be supported by other sites such as Blogstreet and even Technorati is neglecting a number of regular bloggers Down Under.
I am naturally biased when it comes to bean counting, as a result, I am partial to Blogpulse
By the way, Google employs more of my Amerikan acquintances who are also bloggers than the library world which retrenched most of them …
In just over one month since going public, shares in the Internet giant Google Inc. reached an all-time high, recording their largest percentage rise in a single day yesterday. The stock finished trading for the day at US$126.86, a rise of almost 7.3 percent- or US$8.60- and almost double the company’s initial price of US$85. Google Surges As Wall Street Says Buy [http://www.forbes.com/business/services/feeds/ap/2004/09/28/ap1564834.html] – If registration required pops uo attempt to read the full story through my site … I gather Google cached it too.
The blogcensus said it wasn’t tracking this blog – I’m a bit surprised by this as I’m on Ken’s list and on things like the NZBear Blog ecosystem
I put a number of blogs from Ken’s list in which were less know into Blog Census. I was under the impression that for you and others it did state blog already exists …
I cannot believe I could not find reference to you and Chris Sheil on Blogstreet. Tim Dunlop is there and Ken Parish
PS: Sorry John, more of my messages went though than indicated. I kept getting error messages from the comentariat stating error, I persisted over 10 attempts and the first that went though was the one stripped off tegs with the links in brackets. Now lo and behold other two appear even though I tried the ones with links first. (Mystery)
The comment problem arose from MT Blacklist, my anti-spam software which doesn’t like lots of URLs. I’ve changed the preferences to allow up to 10.
Good idea. I gather today Barista has turned his comments off completely. Some are braver than others (smile)
Even Blogger.com which has sign in facilities is targetted by viagra merchants.
Jozef – Soon as the storm is over I will remove the sandbags and open for business.
Believe me, this enrages me. Perhaps I need karate for anger management.
Ach David,
I was under the impression that the Barista Inc used wine barrels and beer kegs to keep the waves of spam merchants at bay (smile)