Blogicide? – drowning in excellence?

The problem

Technoratislide00031When I started blogging two years ago, I found a few friendly bloggers who welcomed me to the blogosphere and I slowly added links to other friendly or interesting bloggers.Within a few months I found myself spending more and more time reading other people’s blogs.

Recently, I have tried to cut down on my blog visits, but there are so many excellent writers that it is hard to do, and more interesting blogs appear every day. I visited a marvelous blog yesterday and realized that it has been four or five weeks since I was last there.

If you consider that I add two or three new blogs to my list of interesting links every few days, it is clear that I cannot keep up with them. I am not alone in this. It is a rapidly spreading phenomena and has gotten noticeable in the last three months.

I have been reading posts like David Weinberger’s, "No, I’m not keeping up with your blog", which discuss the overload that he and other bloggers are experiencing. Many are no longer able to read other bloggers. Some say they don’t even read their own old posts!

The cause of the problem

According to David Sifry, CEO of Technorati, the size of the blogosphere is doubling about once every 5 months. It has already done this four times, which means that in the last 20 months, the blogosphere has increased in size more than 16 times.

More important than this, the posting volume has dramatically increased. In June of 2004, Technorati saw only 15,000 posts a day. Today, there are more than 500,000 posts per day. That’s a staggering amount of output! Who has time to read it all?

A possible solution

Even if you use an aggregator, which informs you when a blog has  been updated, you cannot keep up with that kind of growth. You will have to adopt a more relaxed attitude about reading other people’s blogs or it is going to be a duty, like work, and (sigh) the joy will go out of life in still another area.

I treasure my blogging friends and am happy when my visitors surge off to visit you. I feel I am doing my part to get you the recognition you deserve.

I am really grateful for my visitors, especially those who take the time to leave comments, but I will readily understand if I don’t see you as often as before. There is this incredibly interesting blogosphere out there and only so many minutes we can spend online. Until we all wear surgically implanted WiFi systems, our time on the internet is limited and we have to choose the reading that helps us or entertains us the most.

When you blog, the time pressure is even more severe. I often have to choose between reading other blogs or posting essays on my own.

As the blogosphere continues to grow, it will create other changes that I am not ready to imagine yet. I will content myself for now with writing whatever comes to me and sharing it with my readers as long as possible.

There is one thought that keeps coming to mind: Bloggers created this situations and bloggers will find solutions to it.

When in doubt, keep on blogging!

Thanks to Hugh Mcleod at gapingvoid.com for the idea for this post.

UPDATE:  I suggest a solution in a later post, A Solution for Bloggorhea and bloggers using Movable Type have already implemented this solution.

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