|
Blogging & RSS InformationBlogging: Simply How More of a Phenomenon?
by:
V P Kochikar, Dr.
In a post in my blog, The Webquarters (www.webquarters.blogspot.com), I talked just about blogging’s future. Here we wish try and arrive at a “measure" for how eminent blogging has become, and how more much it is capable of achieving.
It is pertinent to note that we are not talking just about activity the success of a specific blog, but of blogging as a phenomenon.
Before attempt the avowedly difficult question of activity its success, let’s pause and ask, What is blogging? At one level, it is a tool which individuals use for communication and self-expression. Indeed, this was the only use planned
initially. As its usage soared, it as well emerged as a tool for on-line 'communities' to move
and air news or useful information. The most recent emerging use (completely unancticipated in the early years of blogging's existence) is for commercial organizations to move
with various stakeholders.
Thus, a reasonably general definition of blogging would-be appear to be, a technology that lends itself for use by individuals, communities or organizations as a means of communication, information dissemination or interaction.
How do we go just about establishing a measure of the success of anything? One way is to identify its "potential", and measure what proportion of that potential has been achieved. For example, if your institution sells flat-panel TVs, the potential market would-be probably be equal to the number of households in the earth having a home financial gain
of more than a certain figure. If you are trying to popularize a new 'world language' that you have invented, the potential probably corresponds to every human in the earth speaking the language. If you sell beer, the potential sales would-be probably correspond to each adult in the earth drinking 150 liters a year!*
However, it is oft difficult to assess potential in this manner. A surrogate, more practical approach would-be be to identify the 'best' achieved by anybody so far. If you are an athlete, your 'best achievable' may be the current earth record in your event. In the TV example above, the ‘best achievable’ may be the sales volume achieved by the market-leading company.
Thus, the problem reduces to discovering the 'best achievable' usage of blogging. To do this, we must stretch our imagination a bit and ask, what are the "best" technologies** that meet roughly the same necessarily that blogging does, and what is the usage they have achieved? The “best” technologies we have that allow communication, information dissemination or interaction are probably telephones, email, and conventional web sites.
The number of telephone lines (fixed and mobile) in the earth is calculable
at about 2.1 billion. Similarly, the number of email users is in the region of 600 million.
How many a websites exist in the world? Yahoo indexes 19 billion web pages, patch Google indexes just about 9 billion. Taking the smaller of the two, and forward the average website has about 20 pages, the number of websites may be approximated as just about 500 million.
Let’s be conservative, taking the smallest of the 3 figures (for telephones, email users and websites) which is 500 million. To be play it even as safer, let us assume that many a websites represent uses that blogs just cannot. So let us say that the numbers of 500 million overstates the numbers we are looking for by 90%. This leaves 250 million (assuming many a websites are defunct, etc.). It appears safe to say that this represents the usage that blogging must achieve. Thus, the “best achievable” number of blogs is, at the really least, 250 million. The current number of about 80 million thus suggests that blogging has covered just about a third of the distance to its “best achievable” usage.
Of course, we wish be shortchanging blogging if we end this analysis without considering time frames. Patch telephones have taken 20+ years to reach their current usage (counting only from the time mobile phones were invented), email has taken 15+ years, and the web 10+ years, blogging has been about only 6 years or so.
To dwell a bit on how technologies evolve over time, let us look at an elegant concept, the 'S' curve. What this says, really simply, is that every technology has an initial period during which it grows really slowly. As it improves and gains usage, it crosses an 'inflexion point', on the far side
which growth takes off rapidly***. Further down, the technology reaches a maturity stage wherever
growth once once more slackens. Metcalfe's Law, which holds that the quality
of thing
goes up exponentially with the number of its users, applies during the high growth section.
Thus, in S- curve terms, blogging can be thought of as having crossed the grammatical relation
point, and being just about 30% of the way to the peak. In different words, 70% of its potential is yet to be achieved.
______________________________________________________
* If that sounds high, the Czech are acknowledged to drink 167 liters per capita per year!
** As is clean from the context, we use ‘best’ not as an indicator of quality but to mean ‘the one that has achieved the greatest or most widespread use’.
*** Not all technologies, of course, really cross the grammatical relation
point - many a (indeed, most) die out well before they reach that point.
Simply just about the Author
Dr. V P Kochikar has publicised wide
and serves on the editorial consultatory boards and review panels for some international journals and conferences. He has lectured in a guest capacity at business schools and industry fora worldwide. Dr Kochikar has been profiled by Noesis Management Review magazine, and interviewed by, among others, BBC, Business Now magazine, and the Economic Times. Views expressed in this diary are entirely his own.
| |
