I found this site, Blog Pulse through Rich Ray's Web Watch column in the Florida Times Union.
The site highlights top blog posts, top videos, top news stories (sadly, none mine).
It also looks at trends: Kodak vs. Canon vs. Nikon, for instance, gives you a graph of the percentage of blog posts that mentions the company, on a given day. Or, if you really have no life, you can check out Yahoo vs. Google vs. MSN, or Jon vs. Dave vs. Jay, or Rehnquist vs. O'Connor vs. Roberts.
Great way to spend the day.
What really fascinated me about the site were the statistics about blogs. 43,259,622 total identified blogs, with 62,580 new ones in the last 24 hours, and 817,537 new posts indexed in the last 24 hours. This amazes me. I know blogs are a force to be reckoned with, but here's how it looks from my vantage point: I don't know a single blogger whom I didn't meet through blogging. And one whom I did meet in person. That's Shawn.
When I meet people and tell them that I blog, they are always amazed. None of them know any bloggers. Many ask me what a blog is, how you become a blogger. Many also say they have never read a blog.
Many bloggers who know one another do so because of some special effort to recognize and gather bloggers with a particular interest, or from a particular geographical area.
I just seems to me that with that many blogs and bloggers around, you wouldn't be able to swing a cat without hitting a few, but in my actual experience, we seem to be a rare breed.
I prefer thinking that I'm a bit special for my blogging. Maybe I am, after all, that 43 million is in the whole world...
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