is Blogging Important?

I have been pondering Blogging as a subject recently and even posted on the subject of late. Where I have some issues is the amount of junk out there. Last week I posed a question and thanks to all of you who gave me encouraging responses, privately.

It does seem that many people do not like to post comments on blogs. Given the ease with which this can be done I find that surprising. However then I looked at the amount of re-tweets.

Taking a sample of TNooz - and using Tweetdeck to follow a few stories, I found that Tweets and re-tweets amounted to an average of several hundred times the number of comments. I took stories by one poster on TNooz and then counted the number of Tweets appearing on the story vs the number of comments.

But this is just my little counting in an unscientific way.

Interestingly when we look at larger scale - our friends over at eMarketer did some more in depth study entitled: “The Blogosphere: Colliding with Social and Mainstream Media.”

It seems that on average about half the web users in the USA will read at least one blog each month. I suspect that the numbers are far greater.

Blogging has become a media form and an outlet for commentary - both quality and frankly crap.

But there is no qualitative measurement. The social blogsphere applies its own rules based largely on popularity rather than quality as there is little to provide a qualitative measurement in the Social Sphere.

That bother's me. There are clearly a lot of people who are upright citizens who blog and blog responsively. There are those who don't care. Journalists - particularly traditional players in a broad generalization turn up their noses at bloggers. In many cases that is understandable. Given the growth and the impact of blogging - particularly to the detriment of the traditional media outlets for journalism - perhaps we need to set standards for blogging.

I hope that we can do that and self regulate rather than have all blogging classified as junk by such esteemed bodies as the US Supreme Court.

With Special Thanks to the Phillipines Blogging Idol Contest for the image.

http://wordpressphilippines.org/wp-content/uploads/2008/07/blogging-idol.jpg