« Previous

/

Home / Shuffle

/

Next »

Chinatown, Manhattan.

I wrote this for the business section of today's NYT: Deal May Freshen Up Google's Links. It's some informed speculation as to why Google bought Pyra, makers of Blogger.

Bonus links:
-- Kudos to Matt for spotting the Google text ads on BlogSpot.
-- Wired News: Why Did Google Want Blogger? I don't understand the part about RSS feeds. Why would Google need feeds for Blogger weblogs if it's already got all of their entries?
-- I wish the paper had used this photo. Via the guy on the right.

While I'm on the subject of weblogs, here's something I've had floating around on my computer for months that never made it into a story. These are some figures I got from Evan that show percentage growth in the number of Blogger weblogs at quarterly intervals.

9/1/00: 24,489
12/1/00: 52,162 (53% growth in three months)
3/1/01: 93,652 (44% growth)
6/1/01: 148,034 (37%)
9/1/01: 212,225 (30%)
12/1/01: 290,440 (27%)
3/1/02: 425,489 (32%)
6/1/02: 609,808 (30%)

It is by now conventional wisdom that the blogging craze really took off after Sept. 11, 2001. If that were true, you would expect to see a big surge in the number of new weblogs in the months after that date. These numbers indicate that while there was still strong growth, the rate of growth was actually down slightly from the previous quarter. Is the conventional wisdom wrong?

I'm officially introducing an RSS feed after being assured by Tomas that this will not outrageously inflate my bandwidth bills. (What is an RSS feed?) Let me know if you spot any problems.

« Previous

/

Home / Shuffle

/

Next »