marcusodonnell.com: blogsperiment

Now for something strictly non-academic

It takes all sorts...

Superman's Blog:

Wednesday, September 15, 2004

Feeling a little depressed today

I just discovered that two other superheroes, The Incredible Hulk and The Green Arrow, both have their own blogs. And guess what? Compared to their blogs, mine sucks!

Why oh why can't I ever be the first superhero on the block to play with the latest toys???

Thanks to Google Blogscoped for the tip. Its a great site about all things google and other stuff! From the about page:

Another interesting aspect of the Google phenomenon is that this site, its company, its people, and its fans, are behaving a little like Google is more than just a website. People have feelings toward Google. They think of the Googlebot as a human visitor, walking around their server, looking here and there, and taking with him words, sentences, titles, graphics and whole pages. They analyze the Google Dance. They're into Googlebombing, Googlewashing, Googlology, Googlosophy. They are using "google" as a verb (it's found its way into online dictionaries, even). In short, people behave like there's someone out there knowing them. Google has managed to keep to its roots, and is constantly rewarded. As soon as something seems to change, people cry out, complaining. This blog is also reporting on this social phenomemon.

How big is the blogosphere ?

John Quiggin at Crooked Timber does some interesting sums in trying to work out How big is the blogosphere ?

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.

One of the comments makes the key point that readers are also an important part of the blogsphere