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It is disturbing to read another piece of self-denial coming from mainstream media. This time from The Guardian, which, were one to judge from its Comment is Free section, is one newspaper that does understand the true use of blogging and social commentary...

The oped that Victor Keegan carried in the newspaper just a few days ago to me is laughable. As was pointed out by another commenter here, a growth of 100% per year seems phenomenal to everybody but Victor.

But even leaving that aside, the guy just doesn't get his math straight. First of all, he (mistakenly) refers to the number of blogs, where he needs to refer to the number of posts on blogs--and he does that twice in the article! First when he quotes from Sifry's Live Web report (hm, it's blog posts--not blogs--in the Japanese language that account for 37% of all posts on the blogosphere) and second when he compares the number of blogs to the number of videos uploaded to YouTube. Using his own metrics, there are more blogs created daily than videos--in fact, twice as much, according to the very stats he cites (whoever read blogs would  know that some of them publish--cough cough--more than one post per day...)

But interestingly, only a third of these are English-language blogs. This is a great tribute to the way other languages have populated the space, led by the Japanese with an astonishing 37% of all blogs

Considering it is 10 years since the first weblog was introduced and nearly eight years since easy-to-use blogs were pioneered by blogger.com, the number of blogs in operation is not exactly mind-boggling when compared with other phenomena on the web, such as the 65,000-plus videos uploaded to YouTube every day.

...It could be that the vast majority of people prefer just to read blogs rather than write them, especially at a time when their proliferation - there are still 120,000 new ones every day around the world, notwithstanding the slowdown in the rate of growth - makes it much more difficult to gain an audience.

Yet for him this is somehow a conclusive proof that the blogosphere is doing worse than YouTube. Disregard the fact that many of those videos are duplicates or just direct rips from TV. The percentage of identical or "ripped" blog posts will be significantly less; perhaps, it won't even be meaningful. But, leave that aside. I still don't believe that somebody who gets to write a column on new media doesn't get the difference between blog posts and blogs...

The problem with commentators like Keegan is that they are so focused on what's happening in the Western blogosphere--and other milieus--Twitter, Second Life (Wikipedia says that Keegan is curator of the SLart Gallery in SL), etc--that they think it's the end to what users can do with technology. I doubt he knows about the exciting ways in which activists are now using the Web and the blogosphere in the repressed states. There, Twitter is used by political dissidents to send messages whenever they are arrested, not whenever they cat wants to play.

And now tell me this: how on Earth can this be up on the Guardian's web-site for three full days and never get corrected? Umm, how do I leave a comment on this supposedly very hip web-site that is nominated for this year's Webby awards in the Newspaper category? How do I tell the newspaper that one of their reporters screwed up? Well, I can't...No really, how can a newspaper that doesn't permit feedback on ALL its stories be nominated for anything vaguely positive?

It only proves that the newspapers are still as elitist as ever--and if would keep listening to guys like Keegan, so they will remain. And for all the slow growth of blogs, it would be great if these commentators could also reveal the growh (or rather decline) of the newspapers...