133 million: the number of blogs indexed by Technorati since 2002. Over the past week, Technorati has been releasing its State of the Blogosphere 2008 report.
And while not all of those blogs may not be active, the growth of blogs (as tracked by Technorati) over the past five years is remarkable.
- October 2004: 4 million
- August 2005: 14 million
- April 2006: 35 million
- April 2007: 70 million
- September 2008: 133 million
What does this mean?
On the upside, it's more likely now than before that:
- You, your customers, your prospects, and your competitors are reading and writing blogs
- Better tools to interact with the medium exist for reading, filtering, authoring, and tracking
- You can say the word "blog" in conversation without feeling silly
On the downside, it's more likely now than before that:
- Spam related to your business interests lives in "splogs"
- Traditional marketing approaches will find new ways to make consumers hate the medium
- Your "regular" friends know what you mean but still think blogging is for geeks
The latest Technorati report finds that "top bloggers" most often consider their content news. Increasingly, we're seeing traditional media web sites look more like blogs (e.g. WSJ.com's recent redesign).
With greater adoption, will it be much longer before we start dropping the word "blog" as a descriptor, the same way we dropped the ".com" from company names in 2002? (maybe if only to be able to carry on a conversation about our work without hearing snickers...)
