Blog, o Sphere

Ever heard of the term blogosphere? It is defined as the total collective network of blogs (Kirchhoff, Bruns & Nicolai 2007). You got a blog? You’re part of the whole world’s blogosphere.

So how big is the blogosphere? While we had numbers for the amount of bloggers in America in the previous post, let us take a look at a more international level.

Sifry (2006), founder and chairman of the popular blog search engine and indexing site Technorati, has said that as of November 2006 there are more than 57 million blogs tracked. That is the size of the blogosphere according to Technorati, and it sure is a hefty number. Sifry also notes that the rate at which the blogosphere doubles is within the 150-240 days range, which is also very impressive.

Chart shows the total number of blogs (Source: Technorati)

Chart shows the rate of doubling the blogosphere (Source: Technorati)

So, now we’re sure that the blogosphere is gargantuan in nature, and it breeds really fast. What of the blogging communities present though? What do different blogging communities, or different blogospheres, talk about?

America for instance is having their general elections this year. A quick look at the top tags (which are keywords used to identify topics discussed in blog posts) over at Technorati show that Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, John McCain and politics are amongst the top tags, alongside more general tags like technology and video. This shows that the American political scene is hot right now and is a strong topic of discussion.

Another place which politics is a hot topic is Malaysia when it comes to blogging topics. Horribly constrained in other, moderated mediums such as the newspaper or television, the Malaysian public have taken it upon themselves to tell what they think about Malaysian politics in blogs and they are fairly open about it too (or as open as they can be without this happening). I myself read a political/personal blog, Crossroad Creeks, with its many, many posts on politics and law issues that are relevant in Malaysia today.

Blogging communities of course may not necessarily be defined by their geographical location, but also by their topicality. This can be achieved by using blogrolls, which LeFever (2003) defines as a series of links on one’s blog to link to other blogs that are relevant. This helps the community of that particular interest to be notified of each other’s blogs, and shows the issues at hand for a community as a whole. Blogging index sites like Technorati mentioned earlier and Topix separate their blogs by category of content so that you can find the kind of blog you are interested in. Should the blog you view be not that suitable, well, chances are, that blog will have a blogroll, or outgoing links, to other sites and blogs with the relevant information. That is the idea of the blogroll, and that is why it is a useful tool to bring blogging communities of any kind together.

To wit, the blogosphere is a huge web of information and opinions, and linking blogs allows communities to reach out and get together. Makes life easy for blog readers to know what they want. And even if they don’t know what they want, chances are if they click on the links long enough, they will eventually find what they want. Hopefully, anyway.

Oh, and if you were wondering, this blog falls under the "It's an assignment" community. We don't have a webring up yet, but we're working on that.*

* We are not really working on that, as it is not part of the assessment.

References

LeFever, L 2003, What is a blogroll? Why would I want one?, Commoncraft, viewed 1 May 2008, <http://www.commoncraft.com/archives/000427.html>

Kirchhoff, L, Bruns, A, Nicolai, T 2007, Investigating the impact of the blogosphere: Using PageRank to determine the distribution of attention, viewed 1 May 2008, <http://www.alexandria.unisg.ch/EXPORT/DL/38960.pdf>

Sifry, D 2006, State of the Blogosphere, Technorati, viewed 1 May 2008, <http://technorati.com/weblog/2006/11/161.html>