Readers and writers blog

Has the Internet seemed a bit more crowded to you lately?

It’s hard to find up-to-date figures on how many weblogs and other personal websites now inhabit our blogosphere, but I saw a half-hour commercial the other night on TV that indicates the site population is exploding.

Although I don’t usually watch infomercials longer than it takes to click the remote, this one caught my attention: You are set up with 10 Internet businesses each month, up to 120 per year, and it’s as simple as using email. And then you make thousands of dollars per month, per week, maybe even per day. All for $39.95 (plus shipping and handling).

Pay no attention to the tiny caveat at the bottom of the screen — ‘Unique Experience. Individual results will vary.’ — because even the two hostesses on the program, their ample breasts pushed together to portray their brains as less ample, found the program easy. One of them in the first week made something like $1,500, although I don’t remember the exact figure because I was distracted by the cleavage.

Ah yes, it’s the infamous Jeff Paul again in his latest promotion, “Shortcuts to Internet Millions.” Look him up on Google and you will find literally millions of entries either praising him as a marketing genius or panning him as a ripoff artist.

But that’s not the point. Whether or not Jeff Paul serves commerce or crime, it is telling that a hustler like him finds it easy to put up websites — and attract customers for them (after all, somebody is paying for those infomercials).

Of course, while websites like those sold by “Shortcuts” are personal sites, they’re really not weblogs. I guess they’d qualify more as spam blogs — or splogs, as my computer-literate friends say. I’d also guess that at least half the comments we receive at Readers and Writers Blog are from splogs. (Most of the others are just plain spam.)

So let’s talk about blogs. The latest count I can find is from Technorati, which by December estimated that it was following more than 112 million blogs. Now a weblog indexer like Technorati, or its counterparts Google, Yahoo and IceRocket, has complex procedures for weeding out spam and other questionable blogs that I don’t pretend to understand.

For example, I’m not sure how many blogs there are whose total content is “Hello, World,” the words from the automated start program used by idiots like me when they launch a weblog on some free host and then suffer instant writer’s block.

But whatever the head count in today’s blogosphere is, a more significant finding comes from Technorati’s founder, David Sifry, who judges from his data that the total number of blogs doubles every 150 to 200 days.

“Can this possibly continue?” he asks in his most recent biennial State of the Blogosphere report. “I can’t imagine that things will continue at this blistering pace — it has got to slow down. After all, that would mean that there will be more bloggers around in seven months than there are bloggers around in total today. I shake my head as I am writing this . . .”

So do I. Because as Sifry goes on to imply, it probably will continue. After all, it gets easier all the time to put up a blog and there are 6.6 billion people in the world.

If you’ve ever been to or read about one, you’ll know what I mean when I say this blogosphere reminds me of a New England town meeting — those annual meetings where anyone in town can go and express an opinion. But at least, there’s a moderator to keep the discussion, arguments or gunfire down to a dull roar.

There’s no moderator in the blogosphere. And probably there shouldn’t be one. But, to use the word another way, something in the world of blogs has to moderate.

Because as some guy with a pair of smarty pants hanging in his closet said a while ago, the blogosphere is getting to be such a thicket that you not only can’t see the forest, you can hardly see the trees.

– Sid Leavitt