BlogDay2005: The Blogal Village
Last night I set in my Japanese car (Made in Europe) and drove to Tel Aviv (Israel) talking with my Korean mobile phone (Go Samsung!) while chewing an American gum. A half an hour before that, I talked to a Taiwanese journalists using MSN Messenger, writing her in English (Hi Effie!). We have talked about BlogDay – a virtual global holiday for all Netizens.
Donald Trump would say that BlogDay was Huge! I think it was more than huge (is there a word for that?) It started as a crazy idea in a small Blog conference in Israel but the results proved to me that BlogDay is here to stay!
Since June 2005 (3 months ago), BlogDay have generated 30,800 new pages in Google. Technorati lists 1329 Blog posts about it and thousands of bloggers from these countries have participated: Israel, Pakistan, US, Singapore, China, France, Hungary, Spain, UK, India, Italy, Ireland, Malaysia, Cambodia, Greece, Finland, Germany, Taiwan, Korea, South Africa, Japan and many more. The BlogDay description was translated in the BlogDay wiki by bloggers to 15 languages. The wiki got more than 25,000 page views on August 31st; a Greek designer won the BlogDay design contest with his brilliant design to BlogDay future web site.
The A-list bloggers (Mostly Americans) (almost) didn't write about BlogDay. I, as a professional in this field (Blogs, Social software, web2.0 blah blah) was disappointed because I really wanted to read what do they had to say about my project and, because I truly believed that as "main information junctions" they will help me spread the word about BlogDay. Some of them did write about it. I rather some don't.
Today, I assume that most of the bloggers that have celebrated BlogDay are personal bloggers. Bloggers that write about their lives and jobs that are using community based platforms like Blogger or Livejournal in the US, "Yam" in Taiwan, "ioblogo" in Italy or "blogia" in Spain. BlogDay made me realize how huge the market share of the Personal blogs compared to professional blogs.
My "not so wild assumption" is that 95% of all blogs in the world are personal or half professional blogs that are being hosted in some kind of a community portal and the other 5% are professional blogs that are being hosted in independent servers or with services like Typepad (My virtual Home).
95% are personal blogs! Do you capture the power of this large majority of bloggers? Do you, as I did, understand now that most of blog readers visit personal blogs and not the 5% professional blogs and those who are labeled as "A-list" Bloggers (No offense).
A week ago, me and two other Israeli Blog Platform operators, were interviewed about the state of the Israeli Blogosphere (100,000 Blogs!). I was asked why there are no noticeable Israeli "A-list" bloggers and if the Blogosphere needs them to evolve. I answered NO!
My logic came from the realization that most of the A-list blogs that I read (and that those sat in the room read) are niche blogs that do not appeal to the masses, or in other words, we, the people that are sitting in the room and you, the people who read my blog are living in a small bubble thinking we represent the majority of web users (most do not know the word "blog").
Anyway, and here is my point, BlogDay has proved that in the Blogosphere, like no other media ever, the "ordinary" writers and the "A-list" writers are both using "the first universal publishing system in history" (thanks Steven). A publishing system that do not enforce any hierarchy or editing rules, A publishing system that allow any blogger to take an idea and make a small change in thousands of people from around the world, and make them and himself feel like they are a part of something big.
I did started it with 25 individuals that use RSS to "listen" to my blog.
Thank you for celebrating with me.
Join me again in BlogDay 2006 (You can start helping now!)
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