Yesterday evening I visited Technorati‘s first “developers’ Salon,” an event at which non-developer bloggers and “content producer” types like me were made to feel quite welcome. You can find blog notes about the event from JD Lasica and Christian Crumlish.
Dave Sifry and Kevin Marks presented the latest stats from the “cosmos” of blogs that Technorati tracks: 11-12,000 new blogs are added each day. (Roughly 45 percent are abandoned over time.) Over 200,000 new blog postings per day. 2.4 million blogs total tracked.
That’s some serious volume — though it pales compared to the total size of the Web that, say, Google surveys Technorati specializes in tracking, and keeping up with, the part of the Web that’s constantly being updated. The blogs it follows provide a collective editorial filter on the news and the Web (see for instance the Technorati “Current Events” page).
Among the most interesting graphs were those that demonstrated the size and dynamic importance of blogging’s “tail end of the curve.” There’s a vast number of blogs that don’t have thousands of readers or links; maybe they only have ten or a hundred people reading them and linking to them. But, both individually and aggregated into small relational groupings, they provide a wealth of data about what people care about and what’s on their minds. Sifry said that Technorati is trying to figure out better ways to “expose the really interesting stuff that’s going on in relatively small communities.”
The room was packed with three or four dozen developers and blog enthusiasts filled with pizza and beer and the unquenchable notion that their code could make a difference. Technorati is a small startup company (eight on staff now, Sifry said) with a clear and honestly communicated notion that it will at some point need to bring revenue in via advertising and subscription services. But right now it’s at that happy moment when its programmers can just explore new ways of making their users’ worlds more interesting.
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