Counting Weblogs

Making Light (a weblog by Patrick & Teresa Nielsen Hayden) has an intersting post today on the makeup of the blogosphere. The analysis of a more or less random selection of blogs that updated their sites in the same minute a few days ago and were recorded on Weblogs.com seems to confirm my own somewhat more desultory investigation. Here follows the summing up:

So there’s the lot of them. What do I conclude?

— Automated intelligence is stupid.

— Google Ads ought to be more discriminating about its ad placement.

— As noted earlier, weblogging is an activity and a set of customs, not the software and templates used to do it.

— Weblogging as currently constituted may or may not prove to be an enduring literary form, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the weblog template—episodic, open-ended, easily modified to have sidebars and text jumps and comments and embedded mini-blogs, imposing no relationship on it elements beyond chronological order—outlives everything else we’ve done. When people talk about innovation on the internet, all too often it’s about, say, some ditzy proprietary e-business software nobody’ll remember a few years from now. New documentary forms are a far rarer thing.

— We don’t have to read all the weblogs all the time—who could?—but as long as they exist, those parts of the world they illuminate can’t be invisible to the rest of the world. Hardworking teenagers in China, beleaguered housewives in Iraq, avant-garde art students in Turkey—they’re all real to us.

— If there’s an overall message to weblogging—not that there has to be one, but still, if there is—it’s HELLO WORLD.

I don't know whether or not I agree with all of this, but then that's not the point.