According to the most recent State of the Blogosphere by David Sifry, CEO of Technorati, the blogosphere is currently doubling every 5 and a half months, with a total of 27.2 million blogs in existence. If that trend continues there will be nearly half a billion blogs in two years. Of course, exponential growth curves don’t always continue unabated, but I think it is possible that this one may for another two years. Afterall, half a billion is still only 1/13th of the world’s population. Then again how many people in the world have internet access and are able to create blogs, and of those that do how many will want to? Will blogs become as ubiqitous as phones, or is there a point at which, in the next year or so, the blogosphere will become super-saturated?
The key idea underlying the impending Singularity is that the pace of change of our human created technology is accelerating and its powers are expanding at an exponential pace. Expotential growth is deceptive. It starts out almost imperceptibly and then explodes with unexpected fury—unexpected, that is, if one does not take care to follow its trajectory. – Ray Kurzweil
Ah, yes, and then there’s the question of whether or not this exponential adoption of blogging corresponds to what futurist Ray Kurzweil has called The Law of Accelerating Returns, or that the “rate of progress of an evolutionary process increases exponentially over time.” Only time will tell…
