Everyone says the Blogosphere is expanding. But not really. Actually, the growth of number of blogs has exceeded the growth of blog readers. The Blogosphere is expanding more on the blogs axis, but a little slow in the other one. Hence we hear Blog network owners and bloggers complaining since everyone now wants a share in the apple pie. Even the established networks will start to feel the heat, since readers will be distributed in the future more among emerging players.
Though its true that more and more readers are fast picking up the blogs ditching the loyality of traditional media, the rate of growth has to be increased. The readership pie must expand more and quickly.
When we started Instablogs Network, we were labelled as First Indian Blog Network by many peers.
Paul Scrivs once commented on us. -
Instablogs did a genius job of drawing hype, not necessarily in the Western Hemisphere, but actually getting the people of India excited to see their own entry in the blogging arena. If you can get a small percentage of a country with over 1 billion people in it excited, you know you have something good going on.
Though it was intended as satire, there is a very useful hidden thought. If it could be explored further, it could help the blogosphere grow in both directions. It is quiet true that most of our traffic comes from the western hemisphere, which initially surprised us. We expected at least 25% traffic from India and other developing countries, but we found that even our India-centric Indiadaily blog has 80% readership from the Western Hemisphere. My point is: it’s high time we need to get more people from the developing countries to the blogging arena, and help catalyze the uniform growth of readership from all over the globe. It goes without saying that blogs are also the best way to give the ‘teeming’ billions a free voice.
It does not surprise that most of the bloggers are young. The older generation is highly opinionated and experienced in their respective fields. But they are not very comfortable with blogging. Few months ago when I was delivering a presentation on blogging, young journalists who were keen to shift to blogging found most of the blogging tools and jargons confusing, whether it was uploading an image or understanding common stuff like Trackbacks and Permalinks. If young journalists get hassled intially, you can very well imagine the state of mind of our elders.
I have said before that web 2.0 is not all about Ajax, CSS, big fonts or bright colors. it is about Social Networking. It is about people discovering other people’s work. I did an experiment with one of my blogs - Unholywars, which is about Human Rights and Terrorism. The Author is a senior journalist, full of powerful ideas and opinion, but makes simple mistakes like uploading wrong files, or not giving right links etc. He takes an awful more time than us young folks to ‘really’ grasp blogging. This is understandable. Our generation is used to it now.
There are many easy blogging tools, and after spending just a couple of hours you can start working on your own blog. But what also holds back many -would-be bloggers is the scary thought of competing with the zillions and gazillions of competing blogs. Now, opinions are competing for attention.
I feel it is the job of Blog Network owners to increase the readership-pie rather than concentrate on getting existing readers only. It is clear that 1 billions blogs also means 1 billion blog readers. We must encourage and nurture more and more bloggers, wherever they reside.
Comments
I dont know if its the job of the blog network owners really. In fact Im not sure whos job it is at all. What I do feel coming is the blogosphere bursting and/or being torn apart by rivaling blog networks and opinionated bloggers within these respective networks. (this has nothing to do with your network, its just something I fear).
In the beginning people were blogging for the sake of putting great content online and / or stirring nice discussion with other people with knowledge in the field they were blogging on/about. Right now it starts to look like everyones diving in it for the money. Its like I see the same thing that happened to the internet as a whole happening again: commerce might ruin it all.
Therefore I strongly believe bloggers (and network owners) should keep focusing on the blogging itself. If they manage to keep doing that and not focus too much on monetizing their work, the bubble may actually hold. On the other hand maybe it would be a good thing if there would be a blogosphere-burst just like the past dot-com burst. It will nicely weed out the crap and the survivors will have more readership (because I dont expect the amount of people READING blogs ever to go down).
>>I dont expect the amount of people READING blogs ever to go down).
Blog Readers will never go down, it will only increase. But rate of growth has to be increased. Blogging should be taken to all ages of people and should be independent of demography.
>>Right now it starts to look like everyones diving in it for the money.
I can`t say its true for everyone, but even commercial blogging if done in a right way adds value to the web.
I agree completely. But as you said done right. When the internet started getting raped by commercialism a lot of entrepeneurs screwed up. Some however created things done right which is why they are still here and those who crashed during the dotcom burst arent.