Seriously though, in a little over two weeks vernonkoekemoer.co.za has soared to number 4 overall on the amatomu rankings. That says a hell of a lot about the performance and seriousness of the SA blogosphere. I’m privy to the number of visits taking place on this new site, and it is nowhere near what I thought it would need to be to achieve that top ranking.

In an age when blogs can be thrown together in fifteen minutes or less, and visits rise and fall on the viral whims of an audience, I’d take a pinch of salt before looking at these numbers with any sort of conviction.

i) Many blogs, like stars, have a habit of dying over time. So while there is undoubtedly an explosion in active blogs over the months surveyed, a few months of activity does not guarantee sustained activity.

ii) While the numbers are impressive in themselves, they are tiny in relation to the population of SA. A *lot* more needs to happen before we are a nation of bloggers.

I look forward to further results to see where this thing is going.

Have “the people” been driven to unearth and publish more relevant or gritty topics, factoids and opinions currently being missed or glossed over by the now fully commercialised media “industry”?

Oh, wait… that’s not fair… I’m probably misrepresenting the other 99% of blogs which really have nothing to add to social debate, consciousness-raising, even as entertainment value.

;->

Quite possibly, in this context, it scarcely matters if each of the proliferating bloggers offered up just a single vignette of valuable information or stimulating opinion before slipping into obscurity. There Fifth Estate goal might be achieved anyway, and made all the easier by the steady co-opting of the Fourth Estate into the commercial goals of its “stakeholders”.

Whew, got all that off my chest in true blogger style!

Doyen/maven/guru Arthur does excellent work providing some of the most reliable, empirical data about the SA digital realm, but these numbers don’t mean as much as they appear.

Frankly, it’s way past time for the blogosphere to be right-sized to the handful of “social commentators” who can retain their readership for longer than 18 months simply by remaining relevant.

I reckon quality editorial trumps unsolicited, unsubstantiated opinion every time, and even the newest generation of media consumers know this instinctively.

I look forward, wearily, to huge churn and shrinkage in the blogosphere.

(Thought Leader survives, of course! Relevance and all that…)

Joining in on forum discussions has opened up a whole new world for me and I trust the momentum for blogging will continue to grow.

I have wondered if there is a site available with guidelines for newbie SA blog enthusiasts who would like to get a blog up and running, but do not know too much about the technicalities.

I run 63 blogs whereas only one of them is one Amatomu, and not one of them is on Afrigator.Not that I have anything against Afrigator.

That means there is another 62 blogs unaccounted for.

Now if other people do the same well you know where I am going with this.

Well done bloggers!