How many blogs are there?
A gazillion and climbing, roughly speaking. But if you insist on actual facts and stuff and the latest informed commentary, check out this essay by Sarah Boxer on The New York Review of Books website.
Boxer, an author and New York Times reporter and critic, draws info from ten books recently published on blogs. In addition to an overview of all things bloggy, as she puts it, her review is full of interesting color bits. At times she snapshots the big picture and then entertainingly tacks on a gold nugget of a detail, as in the following:
(The largest number of blog posts, some 37 percent, are now in Japanese, according to a recent Washington Post article by Blaine Harden, and most of these are polite and self-effacing—”karaoke for shy people.” Thirty-six percent of posts are in English, and most of them are the opposite of polite and self-effacing.)
Hint: don’t miss the essay’s final two paragraphs, summing up blogs — she nails it.
