NYT article about the fact that one in six Americans now reads blogs, based on the Behaviors of the Blogosphere (PDF) report from comScore Networks, which I’ve downloaded but haven’t had a chance to read yet. I’ve a three hours train journey tomorrow, maybe I’ll get a chance then.
Links, blogrolls and patterns
danah boyd blogs about the patterns she observes in bloggers’ linking behaviours, some of which are very interesting. A few of her comments, though, leave a little to be desired in terms of comprehension of existing technologies which address some of her problems with links – something Joe Clark ably discusses.
Blogs take a shine to Moore’s Law
Is there a Moore’s Law of the Blogosphere?
The reason for asking that question is the announcement this week by blog tracker Technorati […], in its annual State of the Blogosphere report that the number of blogs in the world has jumped from 7.5 million in March to 14.2 million today.
In other words, in appears the blogosphere is doubling in size every five months. Or even more staggering — a new blog is being created out there somewhere every second.
Whenever you hear the word “doubling” related to anything high tech, the first thing that comes to mind is the Law of Laws in the digital world: Moore’s Law of Semiconductors.
If Moore’s Law holds true for blogs, in three years we’ll have 2,000 million blogs. And I bet people will still be talking about ‘bloggers’ as if we are al the same.
Email is for old farts
Email is for old farts, apparently. How very apposite.
Where are all the British tech start-ups?
Tom Coates writes a great post asking why all the cool tech start-ups seem to be in America, and why there are so few of them here, despite the fact that the UK has some amazingly smart and inventive people. Comments on this post are a great insight, and I don’t just say that because I commented.
Technorati keyword searches now by language
Technorati have now implemented language filtering for keyword searches, with their beta providing the opportunity to filter by Chinese, Dutch, English, French, German, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese or Spanish. So, I can search for ‘pledgebank’ in all languages, or I can narrow it down to just French. Nice!
This is only a beta at the moment, but Dave Sifry tells me that they will roll out more languages in due course.
Web 2.0? It’s about finding people
Susan Crawford has a great post about how all this structured metadata in Web 2.0 is really about helping us to see the patterns in the networks that we are a part of, find people that we need to find, and create bonds we need to create in order to get things done.
These meta-informational thingies are letting us see our online environment in ways we can’t possibly see the offline world. What’s important isn’t just that these thingies are dynamic (although that’s clearly important) but also that they can be (1) visualized and (2) affected by the attention of individuals.
[…] we can find issues and people we want to work on/with and then actually do something about it. That’s the big difference. All this high-quality meta-information allows us to see the rules and roles that make up groups online, join those institutions for brief periods of time (because we’re just the right person for the job) and change the world.
Technorati on Newsweek
Newsweek are now using Technorati to provide a list of links to blogs which cite their articles. On their front page are the most blogged of Newsweek’s articles, and then each feature itself, such as this one on podcast porn, links through to a page of excerpts from the blogosphere. It’s a nice little feedback loop, creating a two way street between mainstream media and the blogosphere. I hope we see more of this.
Update on the digital rights pledge drive
Rather than repeat myself here (I always feel a bit odd about cross-posting), I’m going to send you off to Chocolate and Vodka for an update on the digital rights pledge drive I am involved with. Although, if you want to know the score, it’s 450 signees, 550 to go. If you want to support us, please sign and blog!
Defending digital rights in the UK
I’ve had a few meetings with Danny O’Brien from the Electronic Frontier Foundation over the last few weeks, talking about the possibility of starting some sort of EFF-like organisation in the UK and generally volunteering myself to assist. At the moment, the digital rights activist community in the UK is somewhat fragmented and I believe that there’s a real need to provide to the organisations that exist some tools with which to share knowledge and encourage collaboration, and to draw new people into the various related debates.
We started the debate today with the Where’s the British EFF? panel discussion at OpenTech, and a straw poll of the audience at the end showed that there is support for such an organisation. After the session was over, Danny set up a pledge drive on Pledgebank, in order to raise some money to get things moving.
“I will create a standing order of 5 pounds per month to support an organisation that will campaign for digital rights in the UK but only if 1000 other people will too.”
— Danny O’Brien
Already we have 20 people signed up – just another 980 to go before 25 Dec 05. If you believe that we need to protect out digital rights here in the UK (and Europe) then please do make that pledge.
I’m really very excited about being a part of this. Over the last year I’ve got more and more involved in copyright and digital rights activism, and I’m delighted to have the opportunity to do more.