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technoratiTechnology and the Internet are changing democracy in America. Personal Democracy Forum is a hub for the exciting conversation underway between political professionals, technologists, and anyone else invigorated by the remarkable potential of technology to engage citizens in the democratic process.
The number of blogs is growing by about 40,000 a day, about four times the rate for most of last year, and the total number of blogs is rapidly approaching 8 million, reports brother Dave at Technorati. Most of the growth, he says, "can be attributed to the increase in new, mainstream services such as MSN Spaces, and in increases of use of services like Blogger, AOL Journals, and LiveJournal. In addition, services outside the United States have been taking off, including a number of media sites promoting blogging, such as Le Monde in France." There's also a dark side, he notes, which is the rise of fake blogs whose sole purpose is to artificially inflate the number of links to a site, but most of those are not counted in Technorati's data.
More and more, with data like this in mind, I'm thinking that we should stop using terms like "blog" and "MSM" and instead talk about "small media" and "big media" and maybe "networked media" and "non-networked media" with the main distinctions being how much traffic a site gets, how large its operating budget may be, and the extent to which the site links to others, not the particular publishing technology being used.
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Ok, let's stop using them.
I'd love to join a special break-out session at the PDF Forum of people who have never used the phrase "MSM". CJR's Steve Lovelady called for its dismissal 2 weeks ago in favor of "corporate media." For that matter, so did I, in December.
Nobody likes the term "blog" either. You raise good questions in suggesting that we do a better job at classifying different websites. I've phrased a few of them myself.