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Blogging
- Just How Much Of A Phenomenon?
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by:
V P Kochikar, Dr.
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In
a post in my blog, The Webquarters (www.webquarters.blogspot.com), I
talked about blogging’s future. Here we will try and arrive at a
“measure" for how successful blogging has become, and how much more it
is capable of achieving.
It is pertinent to note that we are not talking about measuring the
success of a specific blog, but of blogging as a phenomenon.
Before tackling the admittedly difficult question of measuring its
success, let’s pause and ask, What is blogging? At one level, it is a
tool which individuals use for communication and self-expression.
Indeed, this was the only use conceived initially. As its usage soared,
it also emerged as a tool for on-line 'communities' to interact and
disseminate news or useful information. The most recent emerging use
(completely unancticipated in the early years of blogging's existence)
is for commercial organizations to interact with various stakeholders.
Thus, a reasonably general definition of blogging would appear to be, a
technology that lends itself for use by individuals, communities or
organizations as a means of communication, information dissemination or
interaction.
How do we go about establishing a measure of the success of anything?
One way is to identify its "potential", and measure what proportion of
that potential has been achieved. For example, if your company sells
flat-panel TVs, the potential market would probably be equal to the
number of households in the world having a household income of more
than a certain figure. If you are trying to popularize a new 'world
language' that you have invented, the potential probably corresponds to
every human in the world speaking the language. If you sell beer, the
potential sales would probably correspond to each adult in the world
drinking 150 liters a year!*
However, it is frequently difficult to assess potential in this manner.
A surrogate, more practical approach would be to identify the 'best'
achieved by anybody so far. If you are an athlete, your 'best
achievable' may be the current world record in your event. In the TV
example above, the ‘best achievable’ may be the sales volume achieved
by the market-leading company.
Thus, the problem reduces to discovering the 'best achievable' usage of
blogging. To do this, we must stretch our imagination a bit and ask,
what are the "best" technologies** that meet roughly the same needs
that blogging does, and what is the usage they have achieved? The
“best” technologies we have that allow communication, information
dissemination or interaction are probably telephones, email, and
conventional web sites.
The number of telephone lines (fixed and mobile) in the world is
estimated at around 2.1 billion. Similarly, the number of email users
is in the region of 600 million.
How many websites exist in the world? Yahoo indexes 19 billion web
pages, while Google indexes about 9 billion. Taking the smaller of the
two, and assuming the average website has around 20 pages, the number
of websites may be approximated as about 500 million.
Let’s be conservative, taking the smallest of the 3 figures (for
telephones, email users and websites) which is 500 million. To be play
it even safer, let us assume that many websites represent uses that
blogs just cannot. So let us say that the figure of 500 million
overstates the figure we are looking for by 90%. This leaves 250
million (assuming many websites are defunct, etc.). It appears safe to
say that this represents the usage that blogging must achieve. Thus,
the “best achievable” number of blogs is, at the very least, 250
million. The current number of around 80 million thus suggests that
blogging has covered about a third of the distance to its “best
achievable” usage.
Of course, we will be shortchanging blogging if we end this analysis
without considering time frames. While telephones have taken 20+ years
to reach their current usage (counting only from the time mobile phones
were invented), email has taken 15+ years, and the web 10+ years,
blogging has been around only 6 years or so.
To dwell a bit on how technologies evolve over time, let us look at an
elegant concept, the 'S' curve. What this says, very simply, is that
every technology has an initial period during which it grows very
slowly. As it improves and gains usage, it crosses an 'inflexion
point', beyond which growth takes off rapidly***. Further down, the
technology reaches a maturity stage where growth once again slackens.
Metcalfe's Law, which holds that the usefulness of something goes up
exponentially with the number of its users, applies during the high
growth section.
Thus, in S- curve terms, blogging can be thought of as having crossed
the inflexion point, and being about 30% of the way to the peak. In
other words, 70% of its potential is yet to be achieved.
______________________________________________________
* If that sounds high, the Czech are reputed to drink 167 liters per
capita per year!
** As is clear from the context, we use ‘best’ not as an indicator of
quality but to mean ‘the one that has achieved the greatest or most
widespread use’.
*** Not all technologies, of course, actually cross the inflexion point
- many (indeed, most) die out well before they reach that point.
About the Author
Dr. V P Kochikar has published widely and serves
on the editorial advisory boards and review panels for several
international journals and conferences. He has lectured in a guest
capacity at business schools and industry fora worldwide. Dr Kochikar
has been profiled by Knowledge Management Review magazine, and
interviewed by, among others, BBC, Business Today magazine, and the
Economic Times. Views expressed in this blog are entirely his own.
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