I spent hours gazing at the new life I'd created, tinkering with its gizmos, adding a blogroll--refinements will come later. Some basics elude me, such as how to add links, quoted text, etc. but I'm happily figuring this out, and soon I expect to bring you scintillating snippits of webobilia, as well as a running commentary of how this American survives in the Land Our Ancestors Left.
Meanwhile, in the promise-keeping department, I have a number to report: As of July 2003 (2003!) there were 3.4 million blogs, of which 1.63 million were active. Gee, that's a lot!
Fast forward to January, 2005. In Korea alone, there are 3 million blogs powered by Yahoo, 15 million on Naver, and Cyworld has 11 million registered. About half of those are active, so in Korea--KOREA, mind you, one country among many claiming representation in the Miss Universe Pageant--there are over 10 million active blogs. (We don't know how many are run by Miss Universe contestants, but we'll try to find out.) (Source: http://dijest.com/bc/)
In Iraq, there are 97 blogs, this in a country where electricity and phone lines are at Pre-Stone Age levels. (Source: http://www.iraqblogcount.blogspot.com/)
But they can look to Croatia, where an estimated 11,000 blogs exist, on Blog.hr alone.
So how many are being created each day? As of October 2004, that number was estimated to be 12,000. That's 7.4 per second. (Source: http://www.sifry.com/alerts/archives/000387.html)
That's a lot of us who imagine we have something to say.
How many of these millions of blogs are worth reading? Only 45% have been updated in the last three months. Many bloggers own more than one blog, so the numbers don't reflect the total number of bloggers. Many blogs are simply homework journals, or other work-related sites. Others take naval gazing to new heights (as if I care about your Vice City scores!). There's even one that claims to be the dullest blog in the world: http://www.wibsite.com/wiblog/dull/, where the latest post details the act of knee scratching.
(I promise, I'll figure out how to add links, as well as what makes for entertaining, informative content.)
Meanwhile, what I want to know is, why does Typepad, my blog host, insist that "blog" is a misspelled word?
