Blogging's Big Mess

Gartner Inc.'s recent prediction that blogging will "peak" next year was a gift to headline writers who love short and sharp verbs. So the Big Bang phase of blogging is ending but what we're left with is its Big Mess.

Gartner said that "the peak number of bloggers will be around 100 million at some point in the first half of 2007." Technorati says it now tracks around 63 million blogs and says 175,000 new blogs are created daily.

These numbers are too big to be meaningful and human scale is needed, but even then you have problems. Take a look, for instance, at nycbloggers.com. It has 6,264 NYC bloggers organized around subway stops. It is one of the largest local blogging lists that I've seen anywhere. It's an ingenious, intuitively organized site, and users will likely find many local bloggers worth their time. But they'll also find a lot of inactive blogs. And as useful as this list is, it doesn't help you understand what's going on in this local blogging community.

One project that may help change that, is the soon-to-be launched PlaceBlogger by Lisa Williams, who also runs H2otown, an engaging community and news site about Watertown, Mass.

PlaceBlogger will be a directory about blogs with a local focus. It will also have editor-generated content and headline feeds. The initial list will only be north of 800 sites.

PlaceBlogger will likely make it much easier for people to find local blogs in their community. But perhaps as important, it may help this community of local bloggers share expertise and accelerate development. It may also offer trend data on this important subset of blogging. While overall blog creation may peak, can that be true for community blogs as well? If anything, the access provided by PlaceBlogger may foster the growth of locally focused blogs by exposing more people to them.

The numbers that Gartner and Technorati cite about the growth of blogging don't tell us what's going on. A better indication of the health and usefulness of the blogosphere will likely be found at PlaceBlogger and in similar efforts as work begins in earnest to organize this Big Mess.