The inflation of the blogosphere

With a mix of concern and sympathy I read about blog-based startup ventures, such as Hipertextual, whom I wish all the luck in the world.

As Stephen Jay Gould tells us in his book Wonderful Life, the Precambrian saw one of the most extraordinary explosions of life on record. Life seems to have explored every viable design. Yet, in an event that is still not fully explained, 90% of life forms went extinct.

Every evolutionary process is tied to extinction, whether en masse or of just a few species.

The same happens in entrepreneurship. Phenomena like the internet bubble are examples of mass extinctions in the world of business ventures.

With blogs, what we are witnessing is inflation.

The extinction rate of blogs

The blog phenomenon is not in an early-adoption stage, as Fernando Flores says. On the contrary, we have had more than ten years of blogosphere.

According to technorati, they tracked 15 million blogs in August, and found that the number of blogs doubles every 5 months.

However, in that same post, we are told that 55% of blogs are considered active, meaning they have had a post in the last 3 months, and only 13% post regularly every week.

Parasitism

A worrying aspect of the blogosphere is the parasitism that has grown up around the so-called fake blogs, blogs that exist in order to boost search engine rankings, or as a way to make easy money using blogs and advertising systems such as adsense, amazon associates, and others.

Many of us use these as a way to cover the costs of publishing a blog, but there is no doubt that human nature makes plenty of people greedy, and they create this fake content, which becomes the weeds of the blog world. But it doesn’t matter, because:

When harvest time comes we will be able to tell the wheat from the weeds. Let the two plants grow together. When harvest time comes, I will send the workers to pull up the weeds first, pile them up and burn them. Then they will gather the wheat and take it to my barn.
– Matthew 13:30.

We know that the explosive growth of blogs comes with a parallel explosive growth of spam: State of the Blogosphere August 2005 Part 4: Spam and Fake Blogs.

What matters is that people learn to tell the weeds from the wheat, and that is achieved by improving the credibility of the medium.

Let’s keep an eye on the phenomenon, but with an eye on the numbers and remembering recent experience.