The Popularity of Blogs Today
In
recent studies by the American Life Project and The Guardian (UK),
researchers asked whether or not the popularity of blogs today was
growing in the two countries; and if so, why? The results on the
popularity of blogs today were not exactly what most members of the
blogosphere might expect.
Researchers
working on the American Life Project found that the popularity of
blogs today in terms of readerships in the United States was
absolutely exploding; however, they also found that the amount of
blogs available was increasing slowly in comparison. In the last six
months of 2004, for instance, blog readers grew from a mere 17% of
the population to a robust 37%--a significant increase. However, blog
writers only increased from 5% and 7%; and largely maintained their
homogeneous composition, which is predominantly male, young, and
wealthy. The ALP attributed this explosion in readerships to the
Presidential race, where both candidates employed blogging in some
form to attract campaign donors.
The
Guardian, which performed their study more recently, also found
similar results in the United Kingdom on the popularity of blogs
today. While they also found that readerships had increased
dramatically, they did not find the same issue of slow blog growth;
however, they did find out that a fairly astonishing 30% of frequent
Internet users had never even heard of a blog.
So in
which direction is the popularity of blogs today moving?--To greater
profusion or to obscurity?
Given
that blogs are the best intermediary between websites and forums, it
is hard to imagine that they will decrease in the popularity of blogs
today; conversely, however, it isn't hard to imagine that they will
improve significantly in continuation with how they have changed
since their inception in the mid-1990s.
In the
short term, it is fairly safe to imagine that larger blogs will
experiment with video technology while older blogs stick with easy,
faster-loading models. It is also fairly safe to image that blog
indexing methods will continue to improve and may even break away
from the traditional algorithm method.
