Blogging as Current Phenomenon & Benefits to The Community

It was found in a research paper by Erik Elgersma and Maarten de Rijke that in recent years, the amount of blogs is estimated to have doubled approximately every half a year. It was cited in their paper that Technorati report that about 11% of net users are blog readers and 70,000 new blogs are seen created daily! It was also reported that the blogosphere amount is between 20 and 24 million blogs at time of writing. In other words, the number of blogs have, indeed, increased.

Below shows the image of web trends.

Figure 1.1: Trends in web

The thin red line represents blog trends. As you can see, the web has become something so complicated that a single simple chart to represent web trend couldn't be found.

Figure 1.2: Top 15 blogs and the trend in Malaysia

It appear that blogging has become more of a 'guy' thing. I'm not being sexist here, you can observe that the top 3 trends of blogs in Malaysia is of a personal trend, by the blogger Kenny Sia, Technology by the blogger Bryan and Humour by the blogger name Hemmy. I still remember back then when I was still in high school, blogs are girls stuff. We either blog about our daily lives, we also blog about fashion trends, so on.

In Malaysia, blogs became one of the loophole for the citizen to voice out freely. Of course, that is just the bright side of it. It became apparent that people blog about political topics because Malaysians do not have much choices when it comes to voicing out their opinion on topics like this. Websites like 'MalaysiaKini' is the best example to explain my point. It is one of the website that many visits to know the current update of politic in Malaysia.

Reference:

1) Dawson, R., 2007, The Trend for Trend Maps, http://rossdawsonblog.com/weblog/archives/2007/02/the_trend_for_t.html, viewed 7th May 2011.

2) Elgersma, E., Rijke, M.D., n.d., Learning to Recognize Blogs: A Preliminary Exploration, http://www.sics.se/jussi/newtext/working_notes/05_elgersma_derijke.pdf, viewed 7th May 2011.

3) Gaman, 2007, 50 Most Influential Blogs in Malaysia, http://www.sabahan.com/2007/02/06/50-most-influential-blogs-in-malaysia/, viewed 7th May 2011.