Soon enough, we'll all be bloggers, said The New York Times in an editorial. That, at least, seems to be the logical inference from a study released last week by Technorati, a Web site that indexes blogs. Its annual 'œState of the Blogosphere' report found that there are now some 14.2 million personalized Web sites, full of musings and links about every imaginable topic under the sun, including politics, Christianity, celebrities, and cheating spouses. Nearly 80,000 new blogs are created every day. The rate of growth has been so fierce that the 'œblogosphere,' as this virtual realm is called, is doubling in size every five and a half months. Discussions about blogs tend to focus on their impact on traditional media, but these numbers put the debate in another light. Blogs have become the way more and more of us tell the world we exist, and in the process, they have become the means for expanding 'œthe ephemeral daily conversation' of humanity. 'œThink of it as the global thought bubble of a single voluble species.'
Spare me the hyperbole, said communications professor David Perlmutter in Editor & Publisher, a media trade journal. First, most people still haven't heard of blogs, let alone read any. Second, 'œastronomical descriptions of blogging numbers fail to account for the fact that many blogs are rarely updated, or are orphans,' having long been abandoned to 'œcyberstasis.' And many are so narrow or banal, it's hard to see how humankind is enriched by their existence. One of my female students started up a blog dedicated to 'œcollege women thinking about engineering careers.' She told me the response she got consisted of 'œspam and 50-year-old men asking me for dates, nude pictures, or both.' By the way: 'œShe no longer blogs.'
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