Technorati has just come out with its State of the Blogosphere report for 2008, and the results are either promising or disturbing, depending on your viewpoint.

As Andy Beal’s Marketing Pilgrim points out, the key statistic is that, while the number of blogs in the world has nearly doubled in the past year and a half, post frequency has plummeted in absolute terms, from 1.3 million posts per day to 900,000 per day. This means that the drop in relative terms is even greater.

In short, starting a blog is still trendy, but maintaining a blog is less so. It’s like reservations. Taking them is easy; holding them, less so.

It’s obvious why a drop in blog posts is disturbing. We’re afraid they’re losing their cool, that our vibrant blogosphere will fade into a shriveled husk to match the newspaper industry.

What Andy Beal doesn’t mention, though, is the upside: pretenders come and go, but contenders persist.

We all know the best attribute of the blogosphere is also its biggest weakness: anyone can start one, and anyone can write anything. Even I can write stuff. But, as Andrew Keen so elegantly rants in The Cult of the Amateur, the bulk of what gets written is garbage (except my stuff).

So all of the people who thought blogging was an easy way to fame and fortune have realized the sobering truth: as in every other endeavor, there’s no magic pill. You won’t become an instant superstar. You have to work at it, invest in it, contribute to the community.

Which means that the people who aren’t ready, able and willing to give blogging the attention it needs find their blogs withering on the vine, while the people who put in the requisite effort reap the rewards. Long term benefit to the readers/writers/webbers: less material, but higher quality.

Incidentally, this expansion-contraction is utterly normal and should be totally unsurprising. It’s in economies and governments. It’s in design, as my friend Dorenda points out. It is, essentially, universal.

Management guru Peter Drucker said that you can’t legislate morality, meaning that you can’t force someone, for example, to care about her job. All you can do is manage symptoms. I agree with him, but I’ve also noticed that success or failure is more dependent on ‘morality’ than on symptoms. Starting a blog is a symptom. Maintaining a blog is morality.

What say you?

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 24th, 2008 at 3:49 am and is filed under General technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.