Michael S. Malone writing on ABC News's Web site has taken Technorati's word for it that the Blogosphere is N big. Technorati says 57 million blogs? OK, the number must be 57 million. 100,000 new blogs a day? 1 billion bloggers by 2010? Yup, they must be right.
Nowhere is the question that these numbers are at best only part of the story and at worst an exaggeration. How can you not even mention all the blogs that are created one day and abandoned the following week? Or the fact that many bloggers have multiple blogs? Or all the spam blogs that get counted as real blogs? It's lunacy.
57 million blogs ever created hardly equals 57 million people now blogging.
The number of active bloggers is growing and it's probably an impressive number but there are lots of caveats to those numbers and to understand their meaning the MSM has to ask questions. Remember J-school guys?
Friday, November 10, 2006
MSM Just Keeps Taking Blog Prophets' Word for It
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1 comment:
That's a great point. Compare the sloppy usage of numbers, as you noted, with sloppy analysis of what's wrong with numbers: http://attentionmax.com/blog/2006/10/web_metrics_are_not_a_crapshoo.html
There are a lot of shady numbers, but there's just as much a need for mainstream reporters (and all people in general) to get more acquainted with them and what's behind them.
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