Measure, Don’t Guess – Growth in the Blogosphere

Charles Arthur writes a piece about the slow demise of the blogosphere. Arthur asserts that bloggers are a fading breed, and that

they've all gone to Facebook, and especially Twitter.

Arthur claims to have come to this conclusion via a mixture of anecdotal evidence, and data provided by Technorati. Let’s do our own experiment to see if the blogosphere is fading. Let’s take a very mundane search term – one that we expect to be a constant background in the sea of celebrity death buzz, hi-tech launches and liver transplants : ‘car repair’. As we can see from the Blogpulse graph, it is pretty stable with a few blips here and there:

Blogpulse plots the percentage of all blog posts on this topic. If the blogosphere were dying, the absolute counts would also be slowly reducing (even if the percentages were staying the same as the graph shows).

On Jan 4th, 0.026 of posts were on the term ‘car repair’. This translates to 142 posts (Blogpulse allows you to click through to see the number of hits). On June 21st, where there were 0.027 % of posts on the term, Blogpulse registers 144 hits. Ok, I don’t really see any slacking off there. What happens when we look at more data points? If we do this for ‘car repair’ and ‘birthday’ we get the results below. Here I’ve normalized the values by the percentage of posts (count/percent - the trend shows values for 1% of all blog posts as an artifact of using percent * 100). To my eyes, this looks pretty flat – there is a very slight downward trend, but it could easily be in the noise.

Was Charles Arthur going for a Wired-esque sensational piece?

Comments

[Daniel Tunkelang]

As a blogger, I certainly don't want to think the blogosphere is dying. But I'm curious about your reasoning. Do you want to be measuring blog posts or blog traffic? Also, does Blogpulse screen out splogs? I feel like there are more of those of late, though I have no stats to back that up.

[Vitor]

Adding to Daniel's point...overall blog posts and blog traffic are probably on the rise since internet adoption is still growing. Maybe what needs to be measured is the traffic share (or time spent) of blogs vs facebook vs twitter vs etc. - in a similar way that Comscore measures search engine market share.

[dp]

My anecdotal impression is that there are fewer posts, and that most of the activity is over on Twitter. Of the two dozen personal blogs I track, over the last year most of the people who posted daily or weekly have gone to semi-monthly or stopped entirely. Most of these same people are now using Twitter.

So CA's position rings true for me. I agree that blogging is too much like work - and that the rewards are largely intangible for the bulk of personal bloggers.

I don't take that as a sign of obsolescence, but as indeterminate. Perhaps blogging is cyclical, and that with so many social media, the focus shifts from one to the next. Furthermore, what's happening in the non-Anglophone world?

I like your reference to fading bread.

[Seth Finkelstein]

["car repair"] is a very bad term to use, because it's a phrase common to spam-blogs. You might just be measuring a near-constant spam-blog background. And even if not pure spam, it's possibly a phrase targeted by made-for-adsense sites.

I think measurable proof of Charles Arthur's thesis is that so many of the professional attention-mongers (A-listers) have curtailed blogging for Twitter. Since they make their living seeking out the best sources of attention to feed off of, they're indicators of where that has migrated to.

[Matthew Hurst]

@Daniel - measuring the traffic on blogs would be a good addition to this. However, I was addressing the point that Arthur made which was (as far as I could tell) specifically about creation of content, not consumption.

@Vitor - remember, this is about the long tail. Yes, there is abandonment, but that is also true in Twitter (as has been reported elsewhere). Just as I see blog I read fade, I also find new blogs to follow.

@dp - car repair may be problematic, how about birthday, the other term that I used which showed similar results? You say that proof of Arthur's thesis is found in the transition for A-listers from blogs to Twitter. I'm not seeing that. Could you point to specific cases? There is a lot of twitter use to provide links to blogs, but that would suggest that the delivery mechanism is changing (feed readers to twitter) not that the blogs are disappearing.

[Seth Finkelstein]

[That last was me, not dp.]

You'd need a term that was common in individual sites, but not likely in spam-blogs or made-for-adsense or all the aggregators. It's like background noise. There's lots of sites like those.

Here's one A-lister example:

www.siliconvalleywatcher.com/mt/archives/2009/06/has_twitter_kil.php

"Is Twitter (and Friendfeed) Killing Blogging? Scobleizer Hasn't Posted In 12 Days!!!

By Tom Foremski - June 5, 2009

I was going through a list of venture capital blogs the other day and I
found many were dead, hadn't been updated in months. . . some in years.
But I also noticed that some of the owners of the dead blogs were still
alive and active -- they were on Twitter.

Then I happened to look at Robert Scoble's blog, "Scobleizer." When I
started SVW five years ago, Robert was the top tech blogger and very
prolific, posting many times a day. But I was shocked at what I saw the
other day. The most recent entry was on his blog at the time of writing
was May 29, 2009. UPDATED: He didn't post again for 12 days!

And his prior post was on May 24."

[Seth Finkelstein]

Hmm .. "saying twitter will kill blogging is like saying photography will kill text."

How about like saying the Internet will kill the Mainstream Media? 1/2 :-)

[ekzept]

Regarding 'car repair', 'birthday', or whatever, I do not think it's proper to simply pontificate these as being typical because you -- or anyone else -- thinks they ought to be. I think that if it is intended these be used to calibrate audiences, these need to be established as good measures, meaning that their covariance with some accepted measure of blog activity needs to be modelled. At the very least, some systematic set of regressions between these measures and that kind of indicator need to be done.

Once that is in hand, then you have a way of assessing variability in the blogosphere.

Another way to look at it is that with the numbers and figures you have, it's not possible to have any idea if those changes are significant or not. The variability in the measures might be so large the changes seen are simply within the envelope of typical variation.

[New High Score]

Another thought: Perhaps you might want to check this over a larger time period - say, starting Jan last year. Twitter has been around for some time now, so it would be better to see a longer time period AND compare the relevant metrics for Facebook and Twitter.

[dp]

Just as Seth's was the last, mine was the one before it, and you've responded as though I'm Vitor. I can see why. The position of commenters' ID is separated from the text of a comment by that line, leaving a visual impression that the commenter's ID relates to the text below it.

[Andrew S]

The premise of the Guardian article is simply wrong. Writing on twitter is blogging! Being limited to 140 characters doesn't change that. Writing on or posting photos to facebook is also blogging. Being mostly restricted to friends does not change that.

Wikipedia says: "A blog is a type of website, usually maintained by an individual with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video."