As most of you regular DK readers well know, DailyKos has become the largest political blog in the known universe, attracting over half a million visits a day. (Not to mention recent boost attributed to posting of BabyKos pix >:^)
In a feature in the May 2007 hard copy issue of Discover Magazine, in a photo article called "Map: Welcome to the blogosphere" (page 22) is the following.......
The blogosphere is the most explosive social network you'll never see. Recent studies suggest that nearly 60 million blogs exist online and about 175,000 more crop up daily (that's about 2 every seconds)
Are "the tubes" big enough for that kind of information flow? You know it's not just a big truck.
Well, I feel pretty confident that not many people have more than one "blog". I guess that means that "the fringe wacko bloggers" represent somewhere in the neighborhood of 60 million people. I could be wrong. I'm OK with that.
Update: The Discover Magazine graphic, by Matthew Hurst, is very similar to the following one but the "On the Newsstand link" hasn't updated to reflect the May issue where the actual graphic for this story would be available to view. The May issue should be on the newsstands soon.
Update 2: Photo and story courtesy of Discover Magazine available here...
On the map, white dots represent individual blogs sized according to the number of links.....
So guess who gets TOP Billing in the article? Yup...The Big White Dot!
1- Mr. Popularity
Nearly 500,000 people visit DailyKos everyday, making it one of the worlds most popular blogs. A link from DailyKos is a guaranteed way of attracting web traffic (and therefore advertising revenue) and as a result DailyKos has a strict link policy. Green links represent one way links (that is blog A links to blog B) and purple links indicate reciprocal links (blog B returns the favor)
It sure is fun when I open a magazine like Discover or Middle East Stars and Stripes as I did when I was serving in Kuwait in early 2006.
There is something that brings me a great deal of pride knowing that "hey they're writing about us" a blog that is more than just a giant entity. It has become a place where my country and, consequently my life have been altered, for the good, forever.
Yea, there is a bit of pride showing and maybe I'm just "Mr. Big Head" but there is a some joy in finding stories about my favorite blog, (a place that I go a probably more often than I should), a friend that I call my "open source news paper" The DailyKos.
Update: Thanks for all the recommends! This is too much FUN! Now I got to get to work though.....I'll check in later!