Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
as a whole is not in “having” blogs but in understanding the dynamics of
blogs and the extent of the opportunities they present for companies whether
they're in the luxury sphere or not.
The blogosphere
The cyberspace is a universe that has no geographical, gender, cultural and,
in most cases, age boundaries. The blogosphere has been elevated to this
accessibility by its ability not only to arouse interest, but also curiosity and
a desire to be a part of this world. Since location, gender and age don't mat-
ter in the blogosphere and since the participants of blogs are united by their
interest in an area or issue, it is no wonder that blogs have gained an enor-
mous global appeal and adoption. However, in order to assimilate the magni-
tude of the blogosphere and the potential it holds for luxury brands, let's take
a look at the extent of this collective community of all blogs.
Recent statistics from Universal McCann (March 2008) indicates that
there are 184 million blogs worldwide with 26.4 million of these in the US
alone, which attract 60.3 million readers. They also indicate that 346 mil-
lion people read blogs worldwide, representing 77 percent of active Internet
users. In 2005, there were already an estimated 3 million people or nearly
5 percent of the population of France who have their own blogs, the highest
proportion of blogs versus a country's population in Europe. Technorati, the
blogging research company, put the number of tracked blogs at 70 million in
April 2007 with expected doubling of the total number of blogs every five
months. They also stipulate that 120,000 new blogs are created worldwide
each day. That's about 1.4 blogs created every second of every day! The futur-
istic science and technology magazine,
Discover
, puts this number at 175,000
blogs created every day, which means about two new blogs every second!
Of this number, nearly three million blogs are updated every week,
including nearly one million daily entries by bloggers and millions of posts
by the participants every day. This may seem mind-boggling until we put
into context that the blogosphere is the most explosive social media platform
that ever existed. Although several blogs end up being either abandoned or
inactive, several millions of others are interlinked with one another, making
the blogosphere hyperactive.
You may be wondering where these blogs are, in what languages they
exist and what factors influence their creation. Well, for starters, blogs exist
everywhere (I'm pretty sure someone is blogging from Antarctica or the
North Pole) and they also exist in practically every language in which we can
find a computer keyboard configuration. As I write, the number one blog-
ging geographical zones are Asia and Europe followed by North America,
principally the US. Until 2008, English was the foremost blogging language
but it has currently been overtaken by Japanese, which has become the
