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June 12, 2004

Rise of blogging

Estimates of the number of blogs out there vary. I thought Tim Bray guessed something like 2 million yesterday. A quick Google search led me to Perseus Blog Survey, where the estimate stands at 4.12 million, on the order of a blog for every 1000th human.

It struck me yesterday as I drove home after the talk that blogging answers two questions about personal websites reasonably well:


  1. How do I keep the content fresh?

  2. What lets me do that with almost no effort?

By definition, a blog answers the first question more easily than anything else out there, except perhaps randomly generated content. (And even I don't read my randomly generated content very often.)

These days, blogging software such as the stuff I'm using right now makes it very, very easy. You need to know how to read, and you need to know how to type. But that's about it.

Two improvements that together might take fast growth to explosion:

Posted by Mark at June 12, 2004 06:45 AM