Even blogging representative groups can’t count
Duncan Riley> I must be having a bad day, or perhaps its the inability for the most basic of analysis which is really annoying me at the moment. Either way some people should know better, and blogging representative groups, those who seek to “promote the explosion of citizen’s media” should be at the top of the list. But alas, this is not the case.
I first noticed a few days ago a quote from the President of the Media Bloggers Association, Bob Cox in AP stating that there was only 8 million bloggers in the blogosphere. I decided not to write about it at the time because although I don’t know Cox personally, I have a lot of respect for many of the people behind the Association and didn’t want to make an issue out of them. It could have been left that way had it not been for an AP correction that has gone out and been printed in numerous online and print sources. To quote the correction:
“The story also quoted Bob Cox, president of the conference-sponsoring Media Bloggers Association, saying that more than 8 million people write blogs. Subsequently, Cox explained that he was estimating the number of blogs in January, rather than the number of bloggers.”
I’m not sure how to best articulate the sound of a game show sound given when the answer is wrong, but here I go
Ba-bummmmmm…. wrong Bob, really wrong.
There are a lot more blogs in the bloggers in the blogosphere than 8 million, both now and in January, and you should know better, unless of course the Media Bloggers Association is actually just the US Media Bloggers Association and you were quoting US figures only. I’ve estimated 50 million, and even if you don’t accept this figure any reasonable analysis would state that there is more thna 20 million blogs alone, just in Western markets alone. The more bloggers mis-represent the true figure by under-reporting it, the more some in the mainstream media will not take blogging seriously. Its really big, and it keeps on getting bigger!