Blogs and more blogs

Article in today’s Guardian about the growing popularity of blogs. According to Technorati there are now 23 million of the things, with 1.8 billion links. And here are some more figgers: The Pew Internet study estimates that about 11%, or about 50 million, of Internet users are regular blog readers. According to Technorati data, there are about 70,000 new blogs a day. Bloggers update their weblogs regularly; there are about 700,000 posts daily, or about 29,100 blog updates an hour. The Cat Flap is going to have his work cut out out to cut it in the blogosphere. The specific angle of the Guardian piece , is the arrival of a blog by the inventor of the Web, Sir Tim Berners-Lee :

In 1989 one of the main objectives of the WWW was to be a space for sharing information. It seemed evident that it should be a space in which anyone could be creative, to which anyone could contribute. The first browser was actually a browser/editor, which allowed one to edit any page, and save it back to the web if one had access rights.
Strangely enough, the web took off very much as a publishing medium, in which people edited offline. Bizarrely, they were prepared to edit the funny angle brackets of HTML source, and didn't demand a what you see is what you get editor. WWW was soon full of lots of interesting stuff, but not a space for communal design, for discourse through communal authorship.
Now in 2005, we have blogs and wikis, and the fact that they are so popular makes me feel I wasn't crazy to think people needed a creative space.