Sabbah excellent posting on Blogging

66 percent of the Americans polled by Gallup said the never read the blogs, only 9 percent said they regularly read them.
Technorati today count of blogs reached 29 million, and thousands of new blogs are created daily. This article wonders why do you blog? It looks like the Washington Post discovered blogging just a few months ago, and now they think it’s reached its heyday. There question of why, is somehow smart. Maybe they are trying to find out what have they missed and counter that.
BusinessWeek does not agree with WP. In fact, this article says that blogging is just getting started. It’s hard to imagine the world without blogs, Mena Trott said.
It looks like that big chunk of the Mainstream Media is sitting around having wows and conferences to try and destroy the blogs. Luckily, this was not the case in the Middle East.
But despite this trend, Gallup said that last year “the growth in the number of U.S. blog readers was somewhere between nil and negative.” The report adds, “Many bloggers will argue that the influence of blogs is immeasurably greater than their readership statistics would suggest because of the disproportionate influence they have on opinion leaders, political insiders and modern news media.”
It’s true that too many blogs are nasty and “spectacularly boring” and there’s too much “unedited noise”, but at the end of the day, those who have access to blogsphere have an added-value over the followers of just the “traditional media”. One can read and see all spectrums, unlike the corporate TV channels and newspapers, where in some countries; you have no option but to watch and read those only.
Maybe this is what is worrying the Mainstream Media. Diversity! Which they failed to present to the readers at that given moment. Specially when it comes to hot global topics.But that’s not all. I don’t think the blogging movement has peaked in that too and I certainly don’t think it has entered its twilight. I think it’s simply maturing a little. And this is what makes blogging more powerful, to an extant that the MSM is now trying to fightback. Not because they are the goodguys and we are the badguys, but because blogging is not good for their existence in the long run.