The latest installment of Dave Sifry's State of the Blogosphere has appeared with few surprises - the blogosphere continues to double every six months (35.3 million and counting), and splogs/spam continue to be a big problem (something WordPress's Matt Mullenweg sees as the blogosphere's biggest threat). While 75,000 news blogs are created every day (or one every second), 45% of blogs are abandoned within three months, which means there's an awful lot of cyberspace garbage floating around. The blogosphere's strong growth is no surprise given the barriers to entry are so low. It would be easy to argue blogs have become the business cards of the 21st century. If you want to establish credibility, blogs are an easy way to demonstrate your skills and experience. I recently met with an aspiring automotive journalist, who had a nice-looking portfolio with his newspaper and magazine clips. In offering "professional" advice, I told him to start an auto blog to showcase his writing skills. (You listening, Dustin?)
  While Sifry's take on the blogosphere provides an intriguing snapshot of what's happening, it will be far more interesting to see how the business of blogs evolves this year. The Centre for Media Research recently published a forecast of advertising growth on blogs over the next five years - see my post here. As more advertising gravitates to the blogosphere, most of it will likely flow to Big Media blogs and blog networks such as John Battelle's Federated Media. It will also be interesting to see the growth of podcasts and video-blogs as the tools to create them become even more user-friendly. As much as Rocketboom.com has attracted a lot of publicity (it doesn't hurt that Amanda Congdon has become the Lara Croft of the blogosphere), its novelty will soon disappear (although its audience will  continue to grow) as more people start making vblogs. All in all, it's going to be an interesting year in the blogosphere.
Update: The Boston Globe has a story that blogs are essential to a good career. "It's the new public relations and it's the new home page. Instead of a static home page, you have your blog", said Ben Day, who used a blog to get a gig as a software consultant.
Tags: blogs, blogosphere

You may have noticed a new "Mark Evans" banner at the top of the page. It was done by Scott Lake, who heads up Ottawa-based Jaded Pixel. Thanks, Scott!  While I'm sure Scott is proud of his creation, he has to be far more excited about the recent launch of Jaded Pixel's Shopify service, which makes it a breeze to create an e-commerce store in minutes - complete with payment processing and lots of bells and whistles. TechCrunch has more details, including a link to an interview with Shopify's lead developer. Jaded Pixel, by the way, creates software collaboratively using Ruby on Rails. It's encouraging to see a Web 2.0 company alive and well in alive. Anyone interested in meeting Scott can do so next month at the mesh conference in Toronto.