The State of the Live Web:Truly Amazing!

Wow. I wish I was just as smart as Dave Sifry

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Sifry.

For anyone who doesn't know, Dave Sifry is the founder of Technorati, which is a blog search engine. http://technorati.com/. Currently, Technorati indexes 112.8 million blogs. Wow, that is ALOT of blogs. So this week I have been instructed to comment on Sifry's own blog, specifically an entry discussing "The State of the Live Web, April 2007". Now although I was well aware that the world of blogging is rapidly growing and will continue to do so, I must admit that I was not fully knowledgeable about the statistics, or the concept of tagging...but now I certainly am!http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tag_(metadata) I personally have never made my own tag, but I am almost positive that I have utilized one in the past while either doing research on the web, or simply finding myself on a web page and being unsure how I ended up there. Sifry's posting truly gave me an insight into how useful and important tagging can be. It aids even more in the connecting of the social web, and really just makes our lives easier. With the creation of tags, we have a better chance of finding what we are looking for... or even what we weren't looking for!
Another important point that his blog addresses is the competition between mainstream media and blogs as news outlets. According to the statistics that Dave has provided, the number of blog sites included in the Top 100 Popular Sites doubled from 2006 to 2007... which means it is only going to grow. This competition of mainstream vs alternative media is one area I am a bit indifferent about. Although I believe that blogs provide us with an outlet for our opinions... I am not sure that I agree with this trend of people turning to blogs for news before they turn to the real news sites such as CNN. I truly think that this trend should be the other way around. I understand that blogs have the upper hand now because they relay information and then fact check so we receive the information faster, but how can this be okay? Why are we accepting that having something faster is better than having something accurate? I am not saying that I don't agree with blogs, but I think their use is much different than a news website.
But that might be just me. Anyone agree with me?
Anyways, we should really thank Dave Sifry for founding a website which has popularized the world of blogging, and provides us with a place to connect ourselves with web 2.0!
Check out this video to see how Dave describes blogs!

Here are some of the statistics that Dave provides us with in his blog:

• 70 million weblogs
  
• About 120,000 new weblogs each day, or...


• 1.4 new blogs every second


• 3000-7000 new splogs (fake, or spam blogs) created every day


• Peak of 11,000 splogs per day last December
  
• 1.5 million posts per day, or...


• 17 posts per second


• Growing from 35 to 75 million blogs took 320 days


• 22 blogs among the top 100 blogs among the top 100 sources linked to in Q4 2006 - up from 12 in the prior quarter
  
• Japanese the #1 blogging language at 37%
  
• English second at 33%
  
• Farsi a newcomer in the top 10 at 1%
• Tracking 230 million posts with tags or categories
  
  
• 35% of all February 2007 posts used tags


• 2.5 million blogs posted at least one tagged post in February