Dylan Tweney in his newsletter ups the ante on the number of bloggers:

…most published estimates put the number far lower, at half a million [9] or less [10]. But leading Weblog provider Blogger.com has more than 700,000 registered users, LiveJournal.com (which most weblog news stories overlook for some reason) boasts more than 650,000, and Radio Userland has upwards of 50,000 users. Freeware/open source blogging tools such as Movable Type and Greymatter add even more to the total, though no one seems to know how many.

I asked Steven Levy where he got the 500,000 figure when he interviewed me for his Newsweek article. He said it came from Blogdex. It seemed low to me. I’m glad to see Dylan come in with new numbers.

Also, Dylan traces weblogs back to Douglas Englebart‘s Augment system, “a kind of hyperlinked, team-oriented online journal…” Interesting precursor. I’d never heard of Augment before. But because Modern Weblogs began not as team journals but as individuals publishing annotated logs of where they’d webbed that day, the historical line is at least dotted. Besides, don’t the cave paintings in Lascaux count as a type of early weblog? And the tales told by the Homeric Bards? And Psalm 22? And, when you think about it, isn’t the last warm breeze of summer, sending a chill through the sparrows even as it rocks them to sleep, a weblog? Isn’t it really?

Categories: Uncategorized dw