Archives for December 3rd, 2004

The average blogger in action.

The Merriam-Webster dictionary has named "blog" the word of the year for 2004. I checked my English-Slovene dictionary for the word "blog," but it doesn’t have it. It does have the word blodenje, meaning "aimless wandering, straying, rambling, going astray," which is close enough.

Technorati has 4,833,101 blogs currently listed. According to si.blogs, there are about 50 in Slovenia. That’s roughly 0.001% of the pie.

Blogs remain obscure in the Republic of Slovenia, despite an occasional mention from mainstream media sources. In the U.S., by comparison, bloggers are doing splendidly. This year, they were invited to both the Democratic and Republican party conventions. (If you look at the list of Democrats, you’ll see that not only were bloggers invited, but a large number of journalists and delegates were also blogging about it.) And in the meantime, giants like Instapundit get (as Oxblog recently pointed out) as many page views as a top story on BBC. (Of course, in a recent story about blogs, the BBC couldn’t resist announcing that "…the number of people reading even the most influential blogs is tiny.")

The nice thing about Slovenia, though, is that the page is still nearly blank. With just a handful of active bloggers, there’s still a lot to do. There are things that you can do with your blog now that may be passé somewhere else, but will be a historical first time for Slovenia. Unfortunately, as of November 29, 2004, appearing completely naked on your blog is no longer one of them. But there are still plenty of other fields to tread and new grounds to break… Avanti!