Last week Marshall and I attended the Blog World Expo conference. The gathering, held in Las Vegas, drew over 1,500 bloggers from different parts of the country and overseas. The conference lasted just over a day and a half and had sessions that focused on a wide range of topics interesting to bloggers - from tools to money making.

It was a good conference and we had several interesting conversations, but I walked away with a strange feeling. Somehow it seemed that blogging just isn't that hot anymore. The feeling has been exacerbated by the latest slow down in news. My feeds just do not update that often these days. Can it be that the digestion phase applies to blogs just as it applies to startups? In this post we'll investigate whether the blogosphere is going through a digestion phase.

Blogging Trends and Stats

Before looking at different use cases lets take a look at some trends and charts. According to Google Trends, blog as a trend has been slowing down, while blogging never really had much velocity.

On the other hand, if we compare blog to newspaper we clearly see that blog is on the rise and that newspaper is on the decline.

According to David Sifry's post in April of this year, the blogosphere is experiencing exponential growth. The chart below indicates that Technorati alone indexed almost 35 million blogs in just 3 years - really quite a mind boggling number. The blogosphere has been doubling in that time about every 6 months, which means that if the trend held, there should be over 70 million blogs now.

Such phenomenal growth is even more surprising because there are simply not that many people who blog professionally. Sure there is money to be made via advertisements, but the amount is directly correlated with traffic. And traffic is not evenly distributed, it's skewed toward a handful of popular blogs. What must account for the growth in Sifry's chart is the long tail. That is, people who are getting online to talk about their life, and connect with their family and friends and don't care if only a few people read their blogs.

Like everything else, blogging requires motivation. What is the driving force behind the blogosphere? Lets take a look at different blogging groups and understand why people invest time into blogging.

Professional Blogging

It would be interesting to know how many bloggers from the Technorati Top 100 list blog professionally. Likely not all of them. Beyond this list, we would probably see a sharp power law curve - making a living from a blog is difficult. In each vertical - gadgets, technology, politics, celebrity gossip - there are a few very successful blogs that get a large volume of traffic. In the long tail, and even in the middle tier, there is simply not enough traffic to run a blog as a sustainable business.

The separation can be seen in many ways - traffic charts, Feedburner subscribers, MyBlogLog community size, and average amount of comments per post. The advertising prices between top tier blogs and middle tier blogs differ by an order of magnitude - thousands of dollars per month for a 125x125 banner ad vs. at most, a few hundred for the same kind of advertising.

The image above is from geckoandfly.com.

Many aspire to make money by starting a blog on a niche topic, but very few succeed. Darren Rowse, over at ProBlogger has been running a fantastic blog on how to make money online, and in his latest poll Darren asked his readers how much money they made from blogging in October:

At best, 10% out of 1,300+ respondents made decent money. And likely most of the people who indicated they made over $15,000 are likely blogging in one of a handful of lucrative niches. A quarter of the voters made no money at all. Of those who attempted to make money, most did not make much. What is the story behind these bloggers? We look at them next.

Blogging for Business and Pleasure

Tyler Colman, has a PhD in Political Science and Economics and writes a popular wine blog called Dr. Vino. The blog has been honored with many awards and has a good number of loyal readers. Just by spending a few minutes on the blog you will know that this is a labor of love. Yet, there are ads. A couple of ads are for wineries and wine equipment, an ad for Wine Searchers, topped by an out-of-place ad to search Amazon. And of course a long strip of Google AdWords. It is not likely that Tyler makes $15,000+ a month from these ads. So why does he do it?

Like many people, Tyler does not like to leave the money on the table. Even if it is only $300 the money can be used to buy piano lessons for his kids or help fund an expensive hobby - like wine collecting. Mixing business and pleasure in blogs is common, particularly when blogging about a hobby. Since advertising is widely accepted on the web, blog readers readily accept it, and so bloggers have nothing to lose by adding them, even if it is obvious that the ads are not a huge money maker.

Blogging for a Cause

Money is the primary motivation for a lot of bloggers, but even more bloggers just don't care if their blog brings in any cash. They are blogging because they are passionate about a cause. We explored two big causes - religion and politics. We used Technorati buzz charts to compare Christianity with Islam and Democrats with Republicans.

A couple of conclusions follow from the charts above. First, there is a bit more chatter about Islam than about Christianity. Secondly, Democrats are out-blogging Republicans. And, finally, people appear to be more passionate about politics than about religion, at least when it comes to blogging. Politics and religion are just two issues that people blog passionately about, though. There are blogs about education, sports, non-profit work, the environment, etc.

Personal Blogs

Money making blogs and causes make up just a fraction of the blogosphere. The long tail is all about self-expression. Most people started blogging to stay in touch with their friends and family. As an example of this trend, the latest platform from Six Apart, Vox, is specifically designed around family and friends.

Vox is important because it recognizes the value of blogging around a community. The platform is a response to the fact that it is otherwise difficult to keep track of blogs by friends and family members. Because of this, most blogs in the long tail have not enjoyed a vibrant life. Because RSS readers are still not widely in use, the only way many people know to keep up-to-date with a blog is by bookmarking it and checking once it a while. Clearly this does not scale and that is why older platforms have not been able to really connect people.

Six Apart was not the only company to recognize the problem. In a way, generic social networks like MySpace and more recently Facebook have also exploited this flaw. Both have added some type of blogging to their social networking platforms and connected people with their friends by piping the updates into user profiles. This tight integration, along with the rapid rise of microblogging, is causing a bit of a shift, at least in the long tail. We will discuss the rising battle between traditional blogs, microblogging and social networks in a follow on post, but in the mean time, we turn to yet another kind of blog - spam blogs.

Spam Blogging

Most posts find their way through the blogosphere only to be republished on so called splogs (spam blogs). These fake blogs work by scraping the content of legitimate blogs, republishing it, driving traffic via search engines and selling ads. They are completely useless, but are clever pipes that just make money for the owner with little-to-no work. Very little can be done to stop these blogs, since they've gotten great at remixing the content. They are so good sometimes that you do not realize right away that you are reading a fake blog.

Over a year ago, Charles C. Mann wrote in Wired about the rise of spam blogs. Mann's article provides an indepth discussion on how and why these blogs are created. Another article, published in March 2006, cites a study that found that there are more than twice as many fake blogs as real ones. If that was the case a year and a half ago, today it is might possibly be 10:1. And since it is really easy to create a spam blog, the ratio is only likely to increase.

Conclusion

So what is going to happen to blogosphere? Can it sustain its current rate of growth? The growth of professional blogs might not be there, but likely, the blogosphere is going to continue to grow (if anything, because of an increasing amount of spam). But there is likely to be a correction. The long-tail of the blogosphere might be in danger. Spam is only a part of it, but competition from social networks and microblogging platforms is quite significant. Only time will tell how things play out.

Please tell us why you blog. Does making money on your blog matter to you? What do you see in the future for the blogosphere? Is the blogosphere going through a digestion phase?

Update: Since the publication of this post, Amazon's PR people have contacted me a number of times to request that we remove this coverage based on a draft press release they sent us last week. I said I would not remove the post or all references to Open Social (their Plan B) but that I would post a clarifying statement if they wanted to send me one. The following is what they sent.

"Since the publication of this post, an Amazon spokesperson contacted me to clarify that no announcement was made in regards to support for Open Social. The Amazon spokesperson went on to say that Social network developers have been using the Amazon Associates Web Service to merchandise Amazon products (and earn Associates commissions) for some time. She indicated that Amazon would continue to provide developers with tools that allow them to choose the platform that makes the most sense for them regardless of the Social networking site they are building on. She pointed out that Social network developers continue to use Amazon’s infrastructure web services, Amazon S3 and Amazon EC2, to create and scale applications on popular Social networking sites."

And now, the original post in question...

Amazon is announcing tonight the addition of some of the hottest items in its catalog to its widely popular affiliate program, its support for OpenSocial and a new level of support for RSS.

Digital Assets Now For Sale

Specifically, the thousands of full-length movie downloads offered by the year-old Amazon Unbox and the millions of DRM-free MP3 songs in the new Amazon MP3 service will be purchasable through affiliate links anywhere on the web. There's a whole lot that you can buy and sell through affiliate links to Amazon, but until now digital assets like movies and DRM-free MP3s were not among them.

Unbox affiliate sales have been available for weeks and MP3s for a month. Affiliate program participants are receiving 20% commission on movies and up to 20% on MP3s during the initial introductory period.

Though there is already a thriving trade in physical goods using Amazon affiliate links, these digital assets are likely to be much hotter selling items.

Amazon Goes OpenSocial

Additionally, the company is announcing its support for the Google-led OpenSocial protocol. The company says that starting tomorrow all "applications developers build with the Amazon Associates Web Service will work on all social networking sites that use Open Social." I won't claim to understand the affiliate program well enough to know why OpenSocial based apps couldn't use Amazon affiliate links prior to now, but I do know that Amazon is offering its own Facebook app called MP3Download Sampler - which anyone can add to their profile pages to display their favorite songs and links to buy.

RSS Feeds Now Available

Finally, Amazon's support for RSS, which has frustrated affiliate program participants in the past, has been upgraded. Believe it or not, until now there was no RSS feed officially available for the best selling goods in any category. With this announcement, there will be and that will be another way for affiliates to keep their links timely.

I'm guessing that it's the opening of MP3 and Unbox to the affiliate program that will probably make the biggest impact. I'm not a big OpenSocial fan, though, so I may be underestimating the impact of that part of the announcement.

On our network blog last100, Natalie Fonseca is covering the NewTeeVee Live event. One of the panels today featured VCs talking about funding for the Internet TV market. Depending on who was talking - and the panel included VCs who have backed online video startups like Veoh and Heavy.com - the outlook for VC investments "varied from treacherous to less treacherous", reported Natalie. She wrote:

"Entertainment-lawyer-turned-VC Dennis Miller of Spark Capital warned that there are already investors who are becoming “roadkill” and there will be more roadkill ahead. George Zachary of Charles River Ventures generally agreed that there aren’t a lot of Google-like opportunities in video now that will pay mega-dividends to early investors. Instead, Zachary thinks the money isn’t in the content but in the social networks that are built around content.

Mike Hirshland of Polaris Venture Partners was more optimistic about the possibility for at least a few companies to reach the critical mass needed to really take off — and to pay off for VCs who’ve taken a chance on them."

Other NewTeeVee Live coverage on last100:

• NewTeeVee Live: Brief Q&A with YouTube’s Steve Chen
• NewTeeVee Live: Can the network cope with Internet TV?
• NewTeeVee Live: VCs predict an uncertain future for Internet TV startups
• NewTeeVee Live: MTV exec proposes antidote to piracy
• NewTeeVee Live: AT&T’s vision for IPTV

A 17-year-old Dutch teenager was arrested by very real police for allegedly stealing over $5800 worth of virtual furniture to trick out his pad in online world Habbo Hotel. Five other teenagers were questioned in connection with the virtual crime spree, according to the BBC.

Habbo, which attracts more than 6 million users in over 30 countries each month, is comparable to Second Life in that people use the service to create a virtual likeness to inhabit an online world. A lot of real money changes hands in Habbo in order to purchase virtual goods used by people to personalize their online experience. That real money was involved is what got the police interested in the theft.

"It is a theft because the furniture is paid for with real money. But the only way to be a thief in Habbo is to get people's usernames and passwords and then log in and take the furniture," said a Habbo spokesperson.

It might be easy to draw a comparison to another type of oft-discussed virtual theft: downloading of copyright songs and movies. But there are some clear differences. First, unlike piracy, where the original is left intact and it is really a copy being stolen, the people who paid for the virtual goods in this case were left without any pixels. And second, the virtual thieves' methods were a bit more nefarious -- they lured Habbo Hotel users into giving up their passwords by creating fake Habbo sites.

According to the BBC, virtual theft is a growing problem. "In 2005 a Chinese gamer was stabbed to death in a row over a sword in a game," writes the paper. "Shanghai gamer Qiu Chengwei killed player Zhu Caoyuan when he discovered he had sold a 'dragon sabre' he had been loaned." In August, Business Week ran an article discussing whether virtual currency exchanges that trade in real money, like the one operated in Second Life, required real world regulation following the theft of the equivalent of $10,000 from the Linden Dollar Exchange.

Designed specifically for Mac OS X Leopard, Bento offers one place to put your important information, including: contacts, calendars, projects, and events. Bento automatically displays contacts and calendars kept within Address Book and iCal, with no need to re-enter existing names, phone numbers, email addresses or upcoming events. “Bento is the personal database for the millions of Mac users who appreciate the elegance and ease of use of their Mac,” said FileMaker president Dominique Goupil. “With Bento, we are providing an incredibly easy way to manage all your information — iCal calendar events, Address Book contacts, digital media and files — all in one place, effortlessly.”

Not rain, nor wind, nor chill of night would stop German shoppers from getting their hands on a new iPhone. Shortly after midnight, T-Mobile began selling the Apple iPhone in downtown Cologne, Germany, where an estimated 400 people braved the harsh weather. T-Mobile had planned ahead and handed out umbrellas, blankets, coffee, and pretzels to the waiting customers. A few radio stations offered more than 1,000 euros for the first iPhone purchased, but the buyer preferred to keep the phone.

With Rory Cellan-Jones (BBC News) describing the scene in London as “mayhem”, fans “started queuing at stores overnight” in order to be one of the first to get their hands on a new iPhone. The iPhone has gone on sale at more than 1,300 stores around the UK with each customer limited to two handsets each. After waiting in line for 26 hours, Tom Jalinski was the first out of the London Apple Store with his new iPhone and proclaimed it, “worth the wait.”

Create a Keynote ’08 presentation and you can share it as a QuickTime movie, a PDF document, or as a photo book that can be given to clients after a sales call. Learn how by watching the latest Quick Tip of the Week.

While many of us were discussing Comcast’s partial blocking of BitTorrent Traffic, and debating its implications for the net neutrality debate, a more clear-cut neutrality violation was apparently taking place on Verizon’s network — a redirection of Verizon customers’ failed DNS lookups, to drive traffic to Verizon’s own search engine.

Here’s the background. Suppose you’re browsing the web and you mistype an address — say you type “fredom-to-tinker”. Your browser will try to use DNS, the system that maps textual machine names to numeric IP addresses, to translate the name you typed into an address it can actually connect to across the Net. DNS will return an error, saying that the requested name doesn’t exist. Your browser (if it’s a recent version of IE or Firefox) will respond by doing a search for the text you typed, using your default search engine.

What Verizon did is to change how DNS works (for their residential subscribers) so that when a customer’s computer looks up a DNS name that doesn’t exist, rather than returning the name-doesn’t-exist error DNS says that the (non-existent) name maps to Verizon’s search site. This causes the browser to go to the Verizon search site, which shows the user search results (and ads) related to what they typed.

(This is the same trick used by VeriSign’s ill-fated SiteFinder service a few years ago.)

This is a clear violation of net neutrality: Verizon is interfering with the behavior of the DNS protocol, in order to drive traffic to its own search site. And unlike the Comcast scenario which might possibly have been justifiable as legitimate network management, in this case Verizon cannot claim to be helping its network run more smoothly.

Verizon’s actions have two effects. The obvious effect is to drive traffic from the search engines users chose to Verizon’s own search engine. That harms users (by overriding their choices) and harms browser vendors (by degrading their users’ experiences).

The less obvious effect is to break some other applications. DNS lookups that have nothing to do with browsing will still be redirected, because the DNS infrastructure has no way of knowing which requests relate to browsing and which don’t. So if some other application does a DNS lookup and the result should be a not-found error, Verizon will cause the result to point to a Verizon server instead. If a non-browser program expects to see not-found errors sometimes and has a strategy for dealing with them, it won’t be able to carry out that strategy because it won’t see the errors it should be seeing. This will even cause browsers to misbehave in some circumstances.

The effects of Verizon’s neutrality violation can be summarized simply: they interfer with a standard technical protocol; they cause harm on the whole, in part by breaking unrelated services; and they do this in order to override consumer choice by shifting traffic from consumer-chosen services to Verizon’s own services. This is pretty much the definition of a net neutrality violation.

This example contradicts at least two of the standard arguments against net neutrality regulation. First, it shows that violations do happen, and they do cause harm. Second, it shows that at least sometimes it’s easy to tell a harmful violation apart from legitimate network management.

But it doesn’t defeat all of the arguments against net neutrality regulation. Even though violations do occur, and do cause harm, it might turn out that the regulatory cure is worse than the disease.

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Esther J. Cepeda (Chicago Sun-Times) has discovered the “voluminous” selection of sports entertainment podcasts available at the iTunes Store, proclaiming, “iPod can be sport geek’s all-encompassing radio and TV.” She also notes that the iTunes Store features podcasts about “every imaginable subject.”