AR&D - Audience Research and Development

The blog search engine, Technorati, has passed a significant milestone. They're now tracking over three million Weblogs. Growth has been staggering. 15,000 blogs are added each day. That, according to Dave Silfry, means that "one new Weblog is created somewhere in the world every 5.8 seconds."

Dave continues: "One of the things that drives me personally is that Weblogs are turning us all into producers, creators, and participants in our society, not just consumers. As Doc Searls likes to say, "consumer is an industrial-age word, a broadcast-age word. It implies that we are all tied to our chairs, head back, eating 'content' and crapping cash." Of course, the act of producing, creating, and participating means that we're not doing something else - and here's the best news of all: A Forrester Research report asked Internet users which activities they were spending less time doing in order to spend time at their computers. 78% of the people polled said that they gave up television viewing. A study from The Georgia Institute of Technology's Graphic, Visualization and Usability Center showed a clear shift in media habits with more than one third of respondents saying that they use the Web instead of watching TV on a daily basis."

This will undoubtedly raise the criticism (again) that the size of the blogosphere is its downfall. After all, the thinking goes, how can anybody possibly keep track of all of that? This question comes from a perspective that views information on a hierarchical ladder and assumes all news can be digested with the help of various journalistic filters. It misses the point of the blogdom, that people can make up their own minds about which ones to follow and that search engines like Technorati are there to help.