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One number to rule them all

How many blogs are there? This is one of those questions of incredible interest without any reliable answer. A few companies have been nice enough to provide information that give us some estimate of how large the blogging world is. Unfortunately, most people don't take the time to decide how reasonable (or not) those numbers are.

A side note... My policy with this website is not to include external links unless those sites are seriously something you should check out. In other words, all these other sites I refer to but don't link to do exist; I just hope you don't stumble upon them because they're useless crap and I don't want to increase their Google rank inadvertently. Also, for those links I do have, there are probably other places I should have citations for data but I don't include them because I don't add multiple links to the same page. Just look around and the data is linked to somewhere else.

Some great data comes from the Pew Internet and American Life Project. One poll that has great blogging results was taken between March to May 2003 with about 1,500 people, making for pretty accurate data. Quick statistics review... The poll had a 3% margin of error with a 95% confidence interval, meaning that there's a probability -- 95% in this case -- that their numbers are within 3% of the real numbers, not that any given result is +/-3% of its actual value. Furthermore, the poll was conducted by phone using random phone numbers, meaning the distribution of people who answered the question probably was close to that of the U.S. overall. (Don't worry about bias from people without phones; they probably don't have Internet access either.)

Given this fairly accurate poll, Pew reported that about 2% of American Internet users said they have a blog or web diary and about 11% of 'net users read blogs and web diaries (the data is summarized in their report Content Creation Online). Some people ran with these numbers and found amazing statistics of their own. For example, did you know that 110 million people worldwide read blogs? Well, I didn't and neither did those 110 million people. I'll explain...

Let's say 11% of American Internet users really do read web logs or diaries. And other polls suggest about 200 million Americans (about 2/3 of us) have Internet access from home, work, 'net cafes, whatever. Do the math and BAM -- 22 million Americans read blogs. But then some people take this way too far. Somewhere around 800 million to a billion people worldwide have Internet access, so you multiply 11% by 1 billion 'net users and 110 million people read blogs. You can do the same math with the number of bloggers and you get about 20 million of them.

110 million blog readers, 20 million blogs, right? Nope, nothing is that simple. Look at LiveJournal's statistics. By their numbers, more than 35% of LJ'ers are under 18 years old (graph below). Pew missed a significant part of the blogging population by polling only 18-and-ups, and everyone citing that Pew number as absolute truth missed what I think is the most important blogging group there is.

Pew missed the mark by a bit. So how much did they miss it by? I'll make a few guesses. That 35% of under 18 LJ'ers is probably an underestimate. Half of the people using LJ didn't bother answering the age part of their profile, and I believe most of those non-responses are under 18. Furthermore, there are liars. You can see a little peak around 104 years old; those people put down their age as being born in 1900. And of course, if you're going to have a publicly articulated persona, you want to make yourself look as cool as possible, and older is cooler. I'm surprised there aren't more kids who are 69 years old, but then again how many of them can do the math and figure out they should be born in 1935 for that.

Remember that the Pew study was only about Americans and their Internet use, not the world. If 11% of Americans are doing it, you can be certain that number will not hold for the entire world. While Americans make up about 1/4 of the Internet population, they're probably a majority of the blogging population. LiveJournal records use by country, and a little under 80% of blog writers are from the U.S. So even if 25% of 'net users are American, we dominate the blog world. According to the NITLE Blog Census (which I use with caution as I'll explain later), about 80% of their crawled are written in English, but about 1/3 of all web sites are English and 2/3 of English web sites are in the U.S. Anyone who simply extrapolates global 'net use to blogging behavior will be off big time.

Graphs of each are below, and the key to the rankings are at the end of this page. Though it would be comparing apples and oranges, the NITLE distribution is almost exactly the same as the LiveJournal data (above). Someday it might be fun to delve deeper into the language/country blog differences, but this is as far as I'll take it for now.

One other significant issue is that of definitions. The Pew poll asked if people had read, written, or contributed to a web log, blog, or web diary. I don't want to digress on such a philosophical problem, but people have different understandings of what a blog or web diary is. Did people say yes about writing a web diary when it was just their family's web page? Does Slashdot count or not? Who knows. Problems like this always happen, so we'll have to trust that people know a blog when they see one.

I had a chat with Mary Hodder with Technorati back in October about the big number. (FYI, Technorati deals with all information blog and that's about it.) She said Technorati estimated the number of blogs to be about 12 million, and that they have over 4 million blogs indexed. BBC News recently had an article where they cited Technorati as saying there are 4.5 million or so blogs in existence. Funny, the BBC number is a lot like the number Mary cited for Technorati's crawled blogs. I guess you can't even trust reputable news sources for accurate blogging information.

It gets worse. Other "authorities" for blogging size are cited too often without reflecting on how they got those numbers. NITLE's Blog Census currently has around 2 million indexed pages. I hope nobody is using their numbers yet. They've only gone though less than 5% of the over 5 million LiveJournal blogs (their <5% is less than the number of journals active in the last week). And like I said before, some parts of the sample, such as under 18 bloggers, are only evident in certain domains. Even if NITLE is using a 95% confidence interval, it's meaningless if they aren't sampling from the entire population.

Then there are the "other" polls... Most of these I question their methodologies. A few had open online polls, so you have no idea how representative the poll results are of the entire population (like the poll I cited in my last post. Others look only at LiveJournal or similar blog hosting sites without taking into account the non-blog-service-using people. Even with these complaints, at least those polls had enough intelligence to mention these facts along with their poll results.

What does Technorati do that the rest don't? Their numbers are based on a few things. First, they have web crawlers made specifically for blogs, that use the links in those blogs to find other blogs and add the new ones to their search. They let people submit their blogs to the engine if it's not already there. They also get "pings" whenever a new blog is created on certain blog hosting sites or when new blog software is installed on an individual's site. With all this information, the data and estimates they give are probably the most accurate if any are to be trusted.

So how many blogs are there? I have no idea. If I had to wager, I would put my faith in Technorati's numbers since I trust their methodology the most and since they have much to lose if they've got it wrong. Technorati also said (in that same BBC article) that the number of blogs is doubling every 5 1/2 months -- 10,000 or so a day, a trend maintained for the last 18 months. That 12 million I cited earlier is probably closer to 15 million blogs now.

I'll ignore other counting issues like private blogs (as in not publicly accessible), abandoned blogs, and fringe blogs (without incoming links so they can't be crawled) except to say these make defining what is and is not a blog even more difficult. This stuff is pretty hard to do even with all the data that's already out there.

Finally, Pew just today came out with some new poll results. 27% of American net users now read blogs -- an increase of 58% from February (from political blogs?). Also, Pew says 7% of people now have blogs which is in line with Technorati's prediction of blogs doubling every 5 1/2 months (comparing Pew's Mar-May 2003 poll to the new data). That memo is pretty brief though; I'll wait until there are some methodology details or a full report of their survey data before believing them. Unfortunately, this will not stop people from committing all the same errors I described above and reporting that now 70 million blogs exist and 270 million people read them worldwide. Just wait for it...

That's enough for now. From here, I'll get into more detail about blog readers and writers.

Top 10 rankings for the Global Reach country data.

1. United States
2. China
3. Japan
4. Germany
5. United Kingdom
6. Korea
7. Italy
8. France
9. Canada
10. Brazil

Top 10 rankings for the LiveJournal country data.

1. United States
2. Canada
3. United Kingdom
4. Russian Federation
5. Australia
6. Germany
7. Philippines
8. Singapore
9. Netherlands
10. Japan

Top 10 rankings for the Global Reach language data.

1. English
2. Chinese
3. Spanish
4. Japanese
5. German
6. French
7. Korean
8. Italian
9. Portuguese
10. Malay

Top 10 rankings for the NITLE language data.

1. English
2. French
3. Portuguese
4. Farsi
5. Polish
6. German
7. Spanish
8. Italian
9. Dutch
10. Chinese (big5)

Damn you statistics!!!

I did some research this semester about blogging. The inspiration for this was my economics of information class. As a requirement for that class, we had a final paper and presentation about any economic/information topic of our choosing, so I decided to study the economics of blogging.

At this point, I want to make sure we all understand what economics is. The best definition I heard for economics is that it's the study of the distribution of scarce goods. Most people confuse economics with money. Certainly money has a lot to do with economics, but economics is much more than that. Economics has a lot to say about utility and usefulness, distribution, production, and more.

In other words, I sought to find information that wasn't simply about money and the business of blogging. Someone out there coined the word "blogonomics" as a bastardization of both words "blogging" and "economics." Thankfully that word hasn't been adopted; the person who came up with it (or at least was credited with it) was pandering for donations. This just shows you how little most people really understand about economics.

So I divided my efforts into a few parts. First, I needed to learn more about bloggers. Who is blogging? How many blogs are there? How fast is this growing? This alone is worthy of massive amounts of research to say the least of the two months I had to produce my final paper. I'll start discussing that in a bit, but suffice to say the quality of blogging statistics is miserable at best.

Next, I wanted to get a little deeper into the nature of the blogging realm. Why are people blogging? How are companies using blogging as part of their strategies? Who reads which blogs, how is traffic distributed, and why? Rather than just plea to the Zipf curve, most people avoid the deeper implications of why these traffic patterns emerge and what it means for the blogging world.

I also did some of my own research into the function of the blogging realm. I wanted to look at linking patterns between blogs and the rest of the Internet. Do blogs exist in their own little realm or do they anchor themselves among the rest of the Internet or what? By looking at link structures, maybe I could get some sense about what blogs really do.

At the end, I was left with more questions than I started with. This was the most disappointing aspect of my work; you would like to hope that weeks of work would turn out some revelation but instead I was wondering where I could find other people to help me out. No matter though, I'll offer you the same questions I asked myself hoping that maybe someone out there will get a clue and do this much needed work.

Somewhat related to the research I did for my economics of information class, I worked with a friend on a project for another class using this blog research as some of the basis. Before we began our research, I was showing him some polls I found on the Internet with details about bloggers. In particular, there was one poll that had... um... interesting results.

This poll used a methodology that made it completely useless. It was done by a search engine site, and most of the less than 1000 responses came from people who had registered with that site. In other words, this was a self selected population. When you deal with polling and statistics, the most important aspect is to ensure that your sample accurately reflects whatever it is you're studying. When your poll takers decide for themselves to do it or not, you will never know how or if it's biased. My guess is that only the most interested bloggers will take the poll, biasing it towards more participation and more frequent posting when the opposite is more likely.

This was lost on most readers however. Commenters loved it and said it was great. I can only feel bad for the people who use it to prove anything about the blogging world. There is NO WAY that 95% of bloggers post at least once a week. That's why I won't offer you a link to the poll. It's crap. The only use it might have is for the site that did the poll, to get insight into the type of people who use the site. Given that number above, you should have no trouble identifying it, then closing your browser as soon as you encounter it.

Unfortunately, this poll is typical of blogging statistics. They're loaded with hidden biases, skewed samples, and gaping holes that most people don't care to look for before reporting them to the masses. So let me get this caveat out of the way. Quite possibly the numbers and information I'm going to provide in the coming weeks will be slightly off or outright wrong. This should not detract from the points I will make along the way. If there's anything you should take away from these writings, you should think deeper about the numbers before accepting them as truth.

There are lots of great quotes about statistics I could use as a conclusion here, but I won't. In fact, it's quite possible that I'm here to mislead you with numbers and prove to you that I'm right and everyone else is wrong. But it's also quite possible that I'm onto something, and if so, then I promise you I'll be the most surprised one in the end. Next time, we'll get into the numbers.

Sometimes, one opinion is enough for everybody.

Time for the much anticipated corollary of the Law of Diminishing Opinions.

The Law of Diminishing Interest

After opinions/statements/stories have proliferated about a topic, it will eventually be beaten to death such that no one will care about it any more.

Obviously this doesn't apply to everything. Specifically, a few issues are so polarized, so passion invoking, that no amount of time will let it slide: abortion, hard-core Republicans vs. hard-core Democrats, are Bert and Ernie gay, stem cell research, is "Shiny Happy People" the worst song ever written. And personal blogs are an exception I'll get to later.

So lets take John Kerry and the swift boats mess. It was hardly a month ago that every news program dedicated at least one story to the newest revelation of this story. Everyone had an opinion on it, the opinions proliferated, and the story broke under its own weight. We all got so sick of hearing "turned chicken and ran from the fight this" and "shot some gook in the back that" and now we would rather live the rest of our lives without knowing this ever happened.

Music provides a better example. Why does it seem like there are only ten bands that play on MTV or pop radio stations all the time? Probably because there are only ten bands playing all the time. Popularity in music has limits; only so many bands can be popular at once, so once a new one hit wonder comes along, an old one has to go away. We're no longer interested in that old song. Our interests have moved on to the next big thing.

Let's move to blogging. First, you already only can keep up with a few blogs at once. Your reading 30 or 50 RSS feeds and that already takes up hours a day, but at least it's more manageable than checking 30 to 50 web sites a day. You can hardly keep up with those posts, so you skim most and only read a couple that matter most. Adding another blog is right out unless there's an old one you can remove to make way for the new one.

Furthermore, you don't want to read two blogs that cover the same thing, offering the same opinion. Just like the news, you can get all your news information needs sated from one, maybe two sources that you trust. Any further sources just rehash what you already knew. That's why blogs have to differentiate themselves with witty opinions or pointless pining or random digressions. If you're the same as everyone else, why should other people read what you write? Personal blogs are obviously an exception to this since they are unique as are their authors, but people with a panache for daily posting can quickly become overwhelming...

And even within blog posts, bloggers' laziness is evident in their behavior. The ultimate props you can give is a link and maybe quote to someone else's blog. This results in a single story propagating throughout the blogging realm with lightning speed and with dulling repetitiveness. I can't count how many times I've now read the story about Bush's so called wireless earpiece strapped to his back during the first debate. Actually, it wasn't an earpiece. The battery pack that keeps Robot Bush animated slipped out a bit, and the operators couldn't come on stage during the debate to slip it back in place.

The blogging echo chamber is the worst manifestation of the Law of Diminishing Interest. Here we have a medium that prides itself on interconnectivity and information proliferation. The result of this is repetition, unoriginal commentaries, and shameless self promotion. While the Law of Diminishing Opinion tells us that fewer and fewer new thoughts will proliferate the longer a topic languishes, the Law of Diminishing Interest tells us that we will care less and less about those opinions as time goes by. That's not to say one of those tail opinions might be interesting or not, just that they're lost in the noise as a result of bad timing. This reinforces the value of breaking news stories and being quick with responses to current events, both of which the blogging world are very good at. My point is that as opinions start flowing out about an event, we dilute the value of any one of them because there are so many opinions written and we can't spread our attention that thin.

Surprisingly, these problems are partly solved because of our limited attention span -- the fact that we can only keep track of so many (or few) sources of information at once. With so many information sources available, we ratchet our own information filters very high so that we don't become overwhelmed by keeping up with two hundred web sites a day. The end result of this are Zipf distributions (power law, on a log-log plot it's a line with a slope of -1) of traffic for the Internet as a whole and (as I hope to experiment with soon) blogs. Just like Bush's tax cuts, the top 0.01% of sites get nearly one-third of all traffic. (Porn is different. A small number of sites (say, 1, 3, 5) is enough for most Internet search needs, but we need many more pages of porn to fill our, um, needs. Geoff Nunberg made this observation in one of my classes.)

But this distribution of blogging traffic means you put your blinders on. We like news sources that reflect our own ethics and political views so we congregate to those sites. So those few sites you do read are ones that reinforce your world view rather than expand it as the Internet idealists would prefer.

And thus I offer you a challenge. Start reading something that completely appals you. Democrats -- try the National Review. Republicans -- how about The Nation? Undecided or Independents, read The Week or The Economist depending on how short or long your attention span is, respectively. LaRouche or Nader people, I assign you to read The Constitution. I can happily admit that there is no greater educational experience than understanding your enemies. Not only will it reinforce your beliefs but hopefully it will also make you realize why you believe the things you do.

Simply put, the Internet has too much information to be useful unless you narrow your eyes a bit. This could be the ten pages you read most, the five search results you check after you've entered your query, or the several dozen pages you go to for your porn needs. Blogs are even more guilty of this than most, primarily due to their explosive growth (more on blog growth in future posts). Certainly we need better tools and methods for filtering what's out there to a usable level. But for now, I think we would all be best served by having better porn search tools. Regardless of how interests diminish for most of the web, I think I can safely say that interest in pornography is something you can count on far into the future.

When blogging plays Hardball

It's that time of year again. Elections are gearing up. Mudslinging ads are the same but come with the tagline "I'm (so and so) and I approve this message." Political strategists and analysts get raging hard-ons big enough to knock out hanging chads.

In these times of debate and billion-plus dollar spending on campaigns, I find myself hooked on political coverage. Seriously -- this stuff is the pure crack of our governmental process. When politics and technology mix, well, let's just say it's a mindblowing experience.

So feel free to check out the MSNBC Hardblogging web site at your own leisure. In short, it's NBC correspondents blogging about the upcoming election and political party conventions. Sure, plenty of people are blogging about politics right now. However, most TV audiences and certainly these NBC folks are not acquainted with blogging. You can read some of the comments by authors and emailers as evidence of this. I suppose that's why it feels more like a diary-type blog than any other.

I see Hardblogging as evidence of a change in the media's understanding of their own business and the Internet. Without digressing about the politics of Fox News, their opinionated hosts no doubt are a large reason why people are attracted to their shows. I would love to see evidence of how the news world reacted to Fox News by inspecting the programming of CNN, MSNBC, and others before and after Fox went on the air.

What I mean is that news propagates at an insanely fast speed thanks to the Internet, cable news stations, cell phones, news choppers. and telegraphs; every news station will report on breaking news at about the same time with about the same information. The result is that news stations have to find other ways to differentiate themselves from their competition and increase their ratings. Fox obviously has its own way of drawing viewers. ABC News has promised their "ABC News Now" or something like that, trying to blitz people across all mediums -- Internet, cell phone, TV, semaphore. CNN got the aid of Technorati in their blogging creation and monitoring efforts, but CNN's blogs appear to be written by web site staffers rather than their TV personalities. BBC News is blogging from Boston. There was even a bloggers breakfast at the convention.

Is blogging the answer to the news media's uniqueness problem? No. Besides the diary blog entries, the others are already very much like the "daily emails" you can get if you sign on to these news personalities' web sites, or maybe an op-ed piece in a newspaper. Blogging doesn't draws viewers the same way that opinionated news personalities do.

The question then is this -- what viewers are the media trying to get by blogging? Younger audiences (think 18-35 yr. olds) are now using the Internet as a primary news source rather than TV and print. Certainly they're the ones most familiar with blogging. Even though news organizations are playing catch-up, they still can recapture those people if they wisely pay attention to the news consumption habits of that demographic. Older audiences seem intrigued by blogging as well. Could this be the indoctrination they need to become part of the blogging culture? Remember that blogging and creative uses of the Internet were a large part of Howard Dean's formula for success in the Democratic primaries.

Speaking of demographics, I would love to find out more about the kind of people accessing the Hardblogger site. Average age? Previous experience with blogs? What drew them to the site? How does the blogging experience differ from getting news via plain old broadcasting or newspaper? Are there TV watchers who would like to see the web site but can't?

Regardless, the problem here isn't with the news media trying to break into new formats or get new audiences. Rather it's their lack of understanding about how people consume news and other information and, more important, how people want to consume their news. There are times we want it hard and fast, and others deep and long. However, we aren't given that choice by most news outlets; they present it superficial and at a 7th grade level except in extreme occasions (like election coverage or September 11th).

This perhaps explains the rise and popularity of news blogging. We're tired of the dried-up, half hour versions we get at various times during the day. We're also tired of all news, all the time -- which is really just the same news over and over again every hour. And in both cases, they still talk down to you as if you're a baby.

In better news, I think we're finally past the point of expecting our news to be unbiased and impartial. Viewers perceive the media as generally liberal, whether it's true or not. Maybe there are journalists out there who try to be objective, but in our post-modern times we're aware of and try to see through the spin. Even the media themselves, in a recent Pew Institute study, labeled themselves largely independant but with more liberal than conservative reporters (emphasis on labeled themselves). I would go further to say people are actually interested in getting opinions as part of a deeper analysis of their news (see Fox News above). How many times have you turned on the O'Reilly Factor just to get angry or enjoy what he says? The popularity of opinionated news blogs could also be evidence of this.

To all of you blogging-watching types out there, keep your eyes on this example. This will not be the first break-out of blogging into a new audience, and there certainly will be bigger experiments to come, but election time blogging is unique enough to warrant special attention.

Also, keep an eye on how the news outlets adopt the Internet and its related technologies. They've been very conservative as of yet in their approach to the Internet; a news web site reads similarly to a newspaper. With blogging, faster speeds (think video and audio streaming), messaging and forums, and more advents to come, it's about time they realized that the Internet can be more than a reproduction of the TV (or newspaper or whatever) arm of a news network. There's still room for a traditional Internet face, but they will flourish once they realize the value of their archives, backstage activity, and opinions made available through the Internet. The real revlolution will come when the news media can activate their valuable audience -- getting them involved in presenting, discussing, and debating the current events of the day. What better way is there to capture an audience than to make them part of the show? And maybe that best of all explains the media's interest in blogging.

For now, take joy in the electoral process since it is the culmination of our democracy. Oh yeah, give Hardblogger a few hits and watch it unfold. I only wish they would wise up and offer an RSS...

Would you PLEASE stop talking about YASNS/gay marriage/(insert topic of the day here)?

I propose the following:

The Law of Diminishing Opinion

For each additional blog/op-ed/statement produced about a subject, less and less interesting material will be produced such that eventually no more arguments of value will be made.

What I mean is that only so many useful opinions can be made about a subject. Everyone else just piggybacks off those ideas, and people off those ideas, and eventually nobody says anything new anymore. The value of the next opinion is less than that of the previous one due to this repetition/lack of originality, and eventually you hit a point of zero-gain opinion addition.

You've probably experienced this in your daily events... You have an argument with someone and eventually neither of you has a new opinion to offer so you end at an impasse. There's a group discussion and everyone keeps repeating the same sentiment but phrasing it differently. All of the news channels run the same stories and provide the same information and you think to yourself, "Why have I been watching this for the last three hours when the same news is reported every half hour?"

Remember the Internet ideal of a voice for everybody? Well, it backfired. Big time. LiveJournal claimes to have over a million active blogs. I won't even hazard a guess at message board/IRC/other interactive service user numbers. People want their opinions to be heard, and fuck are they ever doing it. I'll come back to this in a little bit.

This Law also raises the issue of what I call the "Information Problem" -- what most other people consider "Information Overload." Overstated, it means that more information exists than you can possibly hope to absorb in a lifetime, so why try to keep up with it all? Tools can only help so much. I'm conscious only 16 or so hours a day and I have more important tasks than getting the latest blog postings (such as watching The Simpsons). I still do want to know what they wrote, but I have more interests to keep up with than time needed to keep up with them.

This leads me back to a point that I made in some earlier blathering and noted above. We only have so much time, and opinions are a many varied lot so only a few rise above the noise of the fray. (I dare anyone to read EVERY updated LiveJournal on a regular basis. For that matter, try to keep up with more than 30 regularly updated sites every day.) This is a good thing for the Law of Diminishing Opinion -- the fewer opinions that you read, the less likely they repeat. Likewise, you probably pick those few opinions because they seem interesting or original. You can only hope that the noise is repetition or useless ideas, but you never know when a voice trapped down there should be broadcast because it's actually interesting and is not being heard.

That's the price we pay for our limited time and attention spans. This partially explains the music industry. What if the most popular bloggers suddenly turned expressing their opinions into a pay service? Would you pay money to read their blogs? Similarly, would you pay money to listen to music? I bet you already have...

But there I go digressing again... The limited time/limited resources problem leads to many other troubles. I believe more interest (hence $$$) lies in creation and retrieval tools rather than updating and (oh please someday) deletion tools. Think about it -- It's much easier to post to a web log (create) or search on a search engine (retrieve) than it is to go back and proofread your spelling errors (update) or get rid of old posts (delete). I shouldn't say easier -- again, it's a matter of interest. I would rather spend my time adding new stuff and learning new information than changing old stuff.

Because we have a create-but-not-delete inclination, the Information Problem will only get worse. Opinions will proliferate but not differ, and the Law of Diminishing Opinions will be proven time and time again. I know we all feel the impetus to express our thoughts, but can't you please keep it to yourself every so often?

The Law of Diminishing Opinion does have a corollary, but that's the subject of yet another rant...

Give me 100 megabytes and I'll give you a piece of my mind.

I would like to make it perfectly clear that this web site is not a blog. Somehow people get confused that just because I core dump all over this web page it's suddenly a blog.

This is my rant space. This is not a diary. This is not a catalog of my daily events. I am not begging for compliments, looking for pity, or asking for anything in return for doing this. I am not pining, whining, or offering constructive criticism. I do not want your questions, comments, or snide remarks. I may digress from time to time, but do not confuse that with anything of positive value.

Some people are obsessed with recording every moment of their lives on a web page for everybody to see. These people are disturbed. Somehow, real life is not providing them enough stimulation or social interaction so they feel obliged to share their internal monologue with the world.

And I have found no way to make them stop.

For some reason, the Internet has turned into a giant psychiatrist's office. Web forums, IRC, instant messaging, WebMD, GroupHug, and others beg this kind of activity. People you never have seen in real life confide in you, revealing their secrets, all through their web site. The Internet has grown a mentality of "get it all out," furthered by the cover of anonymity that the Internet provides.

If a blog has personal revelations from a person, at what point does the person end and the blog begin? If I stumble upon my friend's blog that reveals their deep, personal thoughts about me, should I ignore it or confront them? Is that an invasion of their privacy? Why would you put something like that on the web in the first place? Should I believe everything on a person's blog or is it all bullshit or maybe something in between? Better yet, what if your parents or siblings stumble onto your blog? Do you want them reading those details of your life?

My rants are just that -- rants. They're angry, pointed, and exaggerated. Is there a message in them? If there are, I don't inject it consciously. I'm not going to put something up here that I don't want other people to read, especially my deepest and most heartfelt thoughts that might harm the feelings of my friends, family, or random strangers stumbling across this text.

But above all, blogging does not empower you with a voice. Just because the text is there doesn't mean anyone is going to read it. So before you go off and get yourself a web journal, ask yourself if what you have to say is something you want someone else to hear.

Speaking of being heard, I always wonder why it is certain blogs are more read than others. How does one person's opinions gain more value than another? A blatant hypocrisy is at work here -- the Internet idealizes democracy because everyone has a voice, yet few individuals have a voice loud enough to be heard over the noise. Is this what we want to construct? Is blogging a culprit rather than a solution? Or is there something entirely different at work here?

I will have more to say in the future about blogging. In the mean time, give serious thought to the nature of blogging with respect to the Internet as a whole.