Now hear me out, I used to be a hater. It seems that the more people blog, the more the internet is loaded up with wasted bandwidth and ad space. The truth is that blogging has a very small marginal cost, and usually blogging occupies time that would not otherwise be spent doing “productive” things.

But! What if all of humanity blogged, and then we could aggregate all blogs on the internet. Now, what if a mother of a special-needs child is having a hard time putting her child to sleep, so she blogs about it. Then the blogging software analyzes the blog and finds similar posts from other authors (Google plugin?) and she reads about the other experiences of other mothers. Can you see how the sum of human experiences, not just book knowledge (like Wikipedia) are tagged, sorted and searchable.

That is what I think blogging is all about, not hits. I don’t care how many people read my blog. None for all I care. Its the sum of all blogs that adds to our collective experience repository called the internet which is important.

Another way to think about it is like this: imagine a graph where number of reads is the Y axis and you lined up webpages on the X. Sort it and it would look something like this: (From the Wikipedia Article)

So most people read the most popular websites. My blog, your blog, your moms blog, they are all in the yellow. Guess what? The sum of the yellow is more than the sum of the green! (Sometimes) That is the true power of the internet, is the capability of supporting an infrastructure for the tail end. How? You guessed it: blogs, wikis, and other user generated content. (I hate to say, web 2.0? ::shivers::)