Over Two-Hundred Education & Science Blogs * † - Department of ...

2. Blog Sphere (Blogosphere)
a. Some Strengths of the Blogosphere
(1) Very Wide Usage - at “State of the Blogosphere/2008”
, Technorati writes (my
italics):
There have been a number of studies aimed at understanding the size of the Blogosphere,
yielding widely disparate estimates of both the number of blogs and blog readership. All
studies agree, however, that blogs are a global phenomenon that has hit the mainstream.
The numbers vary but agree that blogs are here to stay:
(a) comScore MediaMetrix (August 2008)
Blogs: 77.7 million unique visitors in the US
Facebook: 41.0 million, MySpace 75.1 million
Total internet audience 188.9 million
(b) eMarketer (May 2008)
94.1 million US blog readers in 2007 (50% of Internet users)
22.6 million US bloggers in 2007 (12%)
(c) Universal McCann (March 2008)
184 million World Wide have started a blog, 26.4 million in US
346 million World Wide read blogs, 60.3 million in US
77% of active Internet users read blogs
(2) Many Knowledgeable Bloggers
That there are many knowledgeable bloggers can be seen by scanning blog authors’ names
in the present compilation.
b. Some Weaknesses of the Blogosphere
(1) Difficulty in finding out what we need, due to, e.g.:
(a) the vastness of the blogosphere,
(b) incompleteness of blog directories - as discussed in Appendix C6,
(c) relatively weak search engines - as far as I’m aware current blog search engines allow
only keywords searches.
Compare the ADLsphere’s LISTSERV engines (allowing searches within
LISTSERVdiscussion lists by keywords, author, subject title, date, or any
combination of those) with the keywords search engines of, e.g,:
International Directory of Edubloggers (IDE)
,
Technorati ,
Blooged ,
Google Blog Search .
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