Archives for June 8th, 2005

Click to visit Vidmar’s glorious list of all Slovenian blogs.

Vidmar has the most comprehensive list of all Slovenian blogs I have seen to date. If we count his blog there are 12 Slovenian blogs. That makes one blog for every 165.000 people living in Slovenia. That’s not so bad, but I know we can do better
– Andrej Budja, April 18, 2004 [cache]

We can, Budja, and we did. It’s been more than a year since you wrote that and now the count is up to 125. That means there are ten times more Slovenian blogs than this time last year. And as anyone subscribed to this feed knows, we’re getting bigger, faster and naked-er than ever before. Bloggers now account for a full 0.00625% of the population — effectively zero. But! If just another 19.875 people start blogging in this country, and no one quits, we’ll break the 1% barrier! It may sound unlikely, but the U.S. already has 8 million bloggers, which is about 2.66% of the total population. Of course, that doesn’t change the fact that nobody knows what the hell a blog is — either in the U.S. or here. According to a recent Pew report [pdf] 62% of internet users don’t know what "blogging" means. And those are people who actually go online.

Although Slovenia’s bloggers are increasing in number, there have also been a lot of casualties in the past year, including some prominent ones: Slovenia Bulletin, Drepank, even Budja himself. All of them are currently izbrisani. ("the erased") Lord knows how much longer I can hold on. As Simon’s Law tells us: Everything put together sooner or later falls apart. (And the corollary: There’s nothing to it, nothing to it…)

Which brings me to this: This is my 400th post. Although that’s less than Domen does in a week, it still feels like a lot. It certainly feels like I’ve been through a lot. And for the most part, it’s been a pleasurable experience. It’s great watching a small community grow from 0 percent to slightly more than 0 percent, and it’s nice to be a part of it. Obviously there’s still plenty of room left to grow.

One thing that would be nice to see grow is the Slovenia group on Flickr. It’s tiny right now: just 3 members and 8 photos. For comparison: Croatia has 61 members and almost 600 photos. If you have some pictures of Slovenia, are a Slovene, or know someone who knows a Slovene, consider joining. It would be fantabulicious to see you there.

In the meantime, I’m going to just keep on keepin’ on.