The New Power of Social Media

The stream.

NPR's Two-way

Gum, Mountain Biking and Lesbians

Think. Every night or morning in that quiet private time you cherish, you sit and think and form something cogent that you feel warrants some kind of preservation, so you write it down, labor over it, edit, change tenses, search dictionaries for that exact, right word.

And you craft this piece by your hand and find a way to duplicate it, print it by the thousands and while the ink dries you heft the reams of your cogent thinking to the streets and staple the fiche to billboards, phone poles, door stoops. You put them under windshield wipers of parked cars, bicycle baskets of delivery boys, on the free newspaper racks at delis, corner stores, gas stations. You leave stacks in hospitals, old folks homes, community centers. Maybe you even nail one to the door of a church.

And you go home and wonder right up until the point where cogent thought stirs your hand again.

I was getting my hair cut when one barber said to the other something about reading a blog.

"A what?" Said the other.

"You know, a blog."

"But I don't. What does that mean, 'blog?'"

"It's on the 'net, on the web."

My tongue was bleeding. You need to understand the context here, because when I say "barber" all kinds of stereotypes jump to mind, but these guys, and I respect them dearly (my barber especially who makes me look badass), are in their 20s. This is not geriatric ignorance here.

I chimed in. "It's a contraction, the word 'blog.' Comes from 'web' and 'log,' kind of like you're logging on the web. This was called a weblog, which eventually got shortened to 'blog.'"

And that's when I drew the looks from everyone else in the barbershop, a look I've become accustomed to. Nobody like a smart ass, especially in a barbershop. The musing then went to types of blogs that are out there, topics from gum, to mountain biking, to lesbians. And of course, at that point, we weren't talking about blogs anymore.

But everyone else is.

From webdesignerdepot:

Getting a clear picture of the size of the blogosphere is difficult. WordPress has statistics for both WordPress.com (15.1 million blogs and counting) and self-hosted WordPress installations (17.4 million active installations), which gives part of the picture.

There are more than 10 million tumblogs on Tumblr. Blogger doesn’t offer any public statistics on how many blogs they host. Technorati is currently tracking more than 1.2 million blogs. And there are likely millions of other blogs out there hosted on other services like Movable Type, TypePad, Expression Engine, and other CMSs.

Conservatively, it would probably be safe to assume that there are over a hundred million active blogs out there. And more blogs are being created every day. A lot of people have multiple blogs, and plan to create more. And there are hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of blogs out there that have been abandoned by their creators due to a lack of interest (or a lack of traffic).

I have 27. Three of which are personal blogs, one a place where only I and extraordinarily trusted individuals go, and the rest are for my classes. We're on one of them right now. I read a few blogs, one with regularity. I subscribe to them. I read blogs about blogging, metablogs, I guess. I just made up a word.

A far cry from ink and papyrus, but with the same devotion and conviction as Martin Luther. And who knows? Maybe Moses was a blogger, the Ten Posts.

Chime in. Tells us what you think. How has new media pushed the printed word?