We live in a time where people keep going on about how there are a zillion blogs and still ten new ones are made every millionth of a second. This is often trumpeted out as being a “Good Thing” and a sign about how people are getting the chance to speak. It kind of sounds like blogs give a voice to the “Little Guy.”
The reality is far from this.
Most new blogs, unless they are sponsored by a large corporation or are the product of some “famous” person (this includes well known geeks by the way), vanish into the swamp that is the blogosphere.
Far from your blog being the chance for you to set the world right, 99.9% of the time it will just be somewhere for you to while away time while getting things off your chest (like this one).
There is some advantage to this in that it keeps a record of what you thought in the past when you get old, cranky and want to reminisce, but the blog is not a force for democracy.
I’ve moaned about Technorati enough for a while so I will move elsewhere. Take http://weblogs.com/ as an example. It has “see whats changing in real time” option where you can see the new or updated blogs go past. It shows the most recent 10 and each new & updated blog gets about 1 second on the page before it becomes so old its gone.
Out of curiousity, I tried some of these. Now this is not a representative sample as I only clicked on about 20 in total but at least 10 were content free, pure spam sites. At least 10. A few (four) were like this site – http://fha-mortgage-interest-rate.officialfha.com/ and I am not 100% sure it is a spam site but I have strong suspicions.
Some (three) were like http://www.bloggersurfers.net/web-search-engine-optimization/ which while not an obvious spam site, strikes me as being a little ad heavy / content light.
The remaining three seemed OK to me, but two were in Chinese so I have no idea what the content was like.
Overall, 1 in 20 of the new & updated blogs had any content. That site had at best a 5% chance of getting a hit with each new post. It is sad, but there are some great blogs out there with funny and informative content which will never, ever see the light of day.
Very democratic.