Sifry's Blogosphere

Wow. I'm sure I'll pull myself together and find a few words as I always do, but for now, Wow is a good place to start.

According to a blog post by David Sifry, founder of Technorati, the blogosphere is doubling every 6 months. There are 50 million blogs on Technorati; English just passed Japanese as the most common language. (My inkling would be that the Japanese blogosphere is leveling off, and English is just getting started, but that's just epidemiologic handwaving - I have no evidence for it.)

I'm a brand new blogger, just rolled off the turnip truck, and into what? I mean, I'm dutifully going through all the steps of promoting my blog, and I think I'm writing some damned good stuff, but 50 million blogs? How can I compete with that? Am I doomed to spending all my time, as I've done the last couple of days, learning how to jump through geeky hoops that are ultimately ineffectual?

I sent a copy of a recent post to my boss today, and he seemed quite pleased; he said my blog was a "breakthrough." (Oh, duh, I guess that was a cute little joke, since the post I sent him was about breakthroughs; see Sept. 2 post.) Yes, he was in fact pleased, joke notwithstanding. There are others doing vaguely similar stuff to mine; Ben Goldacre at badscience got 2 million hits in August (he does write a column for the Guardian). So the hits are out there after all; the blogosphere is not growing in a vacuum. How do I get me some of that? This blog has had 62 unique hits; the other one has 66.

Obviously, it's time to go to bed. I set my statcounter to blow up my computer if I checked it more than 80 times a day, and I think I'm pushing it.
Sifry
blogosphere
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