To blog or not to blog?
I read in China Daily Hong Kong Edition today some interesting stats on blogging in China. There are currently some15.2 million bloggers in China. Yet, by next year, they will surge to 28.7 million. The most widely read blog in China is by a fellow (Xu Jinglei) on Sina, with some 20 million hits since it was started only 6 months ago.
The article was actually about how some notable people are throwing in the towel from blogging only after a short time, blaming the anonimity of readers and their flaming comments. Those who have been blogging for a while know this too well, and all have their own ways of dealing with or ignoring the trolls.
But what I found most interesting was the study showing that on average every article is reprinted four times on the Internet, and that blogging is adding to the waste of information and bandwidth.
How profound! I never thought of blogging as a waste of bandwidth, but in essense it is true. Almost all blogs regurgitate information originated somewhere else, perhaps in a slightly different slant. If only one percent is orginal stories on the net, then the 99-percent is just needless reduncy, or waste. In bloggers' defense, without all our links pointing to the same story, how are you going to find that needle in the haystack? Then again, without us, there wouldn't be a haystack to block the needle in the first place. Something to think about