bloating the blogosphere

This evening, before I came home from work, I got a call from a far-away-friend, who due to the time difference was on her lunch break, while it was supper time here. She was talking about friends’ blogs and mentioned that she’d given me props on her own xanga. She said she’d never heard of a blog when she first started reading mine, and that when she mentioned it to friends, they had no idea what a blog was either. Interesting, I thought, because I’ve only been blogging for 2 years. How could I get into something on the very front end, ahead of my students, that has in only 2 years become a phenomenon, a household word, and has made it into the dictionary? (no, of course it’s not yet in the Microsoft Office “tools” dictionary, don’t expect a miracle.)
I’m really not that technologically cutting edge, except that in my sphere, I seem to be way out ahead. I remembered that 5 years ago, I was distributing assignments to my classes on-line using PDF files and that I had to stop, because the students were complaining that they couldn’t access the files because they had no internet access, or their computers wouldn’t run Acrobat Reader. Sheesh. I could get no support from other faculty and administration because none of them had a clue what I was talking about. Now they are practically begging the faculty to have course materials available online.
As my students now begin to realize how duped the dude who delivered their dell was, they are oohing over Apple products, but I have to point out that I have used nothing but Macs since 1988, hmmm, come to think of it, that’s all I’ve ever used. But we were talking about blogs weren’t we. Weren’t we?
So after our conversation, I thought I’d see how cutting edge I actually was back in the fall of ’03. So I googled a bit and found a technorati report that showed just over 500,000 blogs in Oct. ’03. Wow! I did feel a little special then, especially since I know so many who have been blogging for much longer than I have. So I looked at the report again, and saw that in March, ’05, technorati was tracking 7.9 million blogs, and that showed that the blogosphere was doubling every 5 months. If you go to technorati now, you’ll see that they are tracking 21 million blogs, which means it’s tripled since spring.
A new blog created every 2.2 seconds, and 500,000 new posts every day.
Who are all these new bloggers? I thought you’d ask. Of course I don’t know, but I do know of a few. Three of them live with me, and I have no doubt that another under my roof will join forthwith. One you’ve met, another, some of you have found, but the latest sneakily built a blog and started posting completely on his own, so none of us knew of him, except maybe technorati.