The Blog Boom

I have this opinion that blogging as social networking platform is slowly eating away at certain other networking platforms such as ryze, or Orkut. Per this article, the total blogs in April 2005 stood at 50 million with approximately 1 million blogs from the Indian Subcontinent. Here are my reasons why blogging is such a growing medium, not necessarily in any order of significance:

• Your blog is the virtual you. There is no other platform which gives an opportunity to express the sum total of the person you are as much as blogging does. With blogging, you are not your resume or just someone who is interested in white collar crimes.
• Blogging is not need-based. It is wish-based. So while you'll be active on LinkedIn, if you're looking for a job or growing your business at any point, you can blog for much more mundane reasons like reporting what your dog did last Sunday or publicizing what is so weird about you.
• Content-type: While most networking sites go as far as letting you upload a photograph of yourself, with blogging you get: as many photos as you want, dynamic content like RSS feeds, videos, & sundry other scripts you can run for various purposes (like site meters). A blog any day is more dynamic, & more you, than your other networking profile(s).
• Customization: You can make your blog look the way you want to limited only by your exposure to web technologies. Even if you're not a HTML/CSS/Ajax wizard, each blog can be customized easily to make it your own. Other networking sites provide you with only a filter to differentiate public information about yourself from the private ones.
• Interactive: This is a very important reason why blogs are so popular. Blogging is essentially a communication platform & potentially develops into a community. I find that people whose posts receive a lot of comments also post more frequently than those whose blogs do not get too much traffic. With other social networking platforms, the extent of communication is limited by their very design (like Orkut scrapbooks)
• No sign-up required: Anybody can see your blog, & just about anybody can comment, depending on how you've configured your blog. Other networking sites typically need you to be a member to view a profile. With blogging, everybody is welcome to participate.
• Auxiliary technologies: There are a host of other technologies that support blogging. These include RSS which lets people subscribe to your blog & be notified when you publish. Technocrati maintains blogger profiles & lets the world discover the type of content they are interested in. You can also post from email.
• And finally, while you'd typically have just one Ryze or Orkut profile, you can have many blogs.