Nothing in the latest Technorati statistics to suggest whether or not the content being created on blogs is becoming more useful or interesting or valuable, but there’s no doubt that the blog engine continues to run at a pretty high RPM. Some of the findings:
Technorati now tracks over 27.2 Million blogs
The blogosphere is doubling in size every 5 and a half months
It is now over 60 times bigger than it was 3 years ago
On average, a new weblog is created every second of every day
13.7 million bloggers are still posting 3 months after their blogs are created
Spings (Spam Pings) can sometimes account for as much as 60% of the total daily pings Technorati receives
Technorati tracks about 1.2 Million new blog posts each day, about 50,000 per hour
Over 81 Million posts with tags since January 2005, increasing by 400,000 per day
1.2 million posts a day is a pretty amazing number. And if the trends hold true, by June that will be over 2 million, and 4 million by the beginning of next year. A part of me finds that overwhelming, but a bigger part of me finds it exciting as all get out. There is much to learn in that soup of posts. Think of the opportunity. The key is being able to find it, evaluate it and use it effectively.
(Cross posted at ETI) It seems more and more mainstream media outlets are turning to Wikipedia as a trusted source. Take this article in today’s Washington Post, for example:
At the start of the season 30 ethnic Samoans were in NFL training camps and according to Wikipedia, the web based encyclopedia, it has been estimated that a Samoan male (either an American Samoan, or a Samoan living in the 50 United States) is 40 times more likely to play in the NFL than a non-Samoan American.
Hmmm…interesting. I think.
But isn’t that a really strange stat to have crop up in Wikipedia? So I did a little more digging. (I have no life.) That interesting little tidbit was added to Wikipedia on November 29, 2003 by someone going by the name of Dale Arnett who most recently has been working on (just today in fact) the Ric Flair entry, by the way. (For the uninitiated, he’s a professional wrestler.) And what do we know about Dale?
I spent a good chunk of my childhood in Chicagoland, both in the city of Chicago and in Berwyn, but I spent my teenage years in Paducah. After a convoluted path from my bachelor’s to my master’s degree, and an excruciating job search, I started working for Union Carbide in South Charleston, West Virginia (living in Dunbar) in 1990. I got “Dow-sized” in 2002, as I was one of the many people let go not long after Dow bought Union Carbide in 2001. After about a year working for a Dow contractor doing much the same work I had been doing, I wound up in law school.
I’m planning to take the Kentucky bar in July 2006.
Hmmm…interesting. I think.
So here’s the question. Do you think the Post reporter knows that he’s included information that is over 2.5 years old and that was contributed by a guy who has created Wikipedia articles on everything from Xenia Onatopp to Chik-fil-A to Kentucky State Highway 3005?
And the even bigger question…should WE care?
Welcome to the crazy world of socially constructed knowledge…
Tags: wikipedia,, literacy
