What? Leaving Already?

Whadda ya know? Another weblog. How many of these things does the world need anyway? Nobody can even authoritatively say how many blogs exist out there. I know because I've done a couple dozen searches to find the answer. The common estimates range from somewhere between 50 million to 215 million blogs. 50 to 215 million - that's quite a range. I wish I could have used that type of range for math tests in grade school. Miss Saunders, the answer to question #7, "1200 divided by 42" is between 1 and 175. Or how about that little incident on Colonial Drive last summer, "Yes officer, I do know how fast I was going in that 35 miles per hour zone. It was between 15 and 65." Second thought, no, not a good idea in that situation.

One statistical data site claimed that there are over 500 million weblogs globally. I had to throw that out as an anomaly. It was too high an estimate. It skewed the bell. Even so, is it really possible that there could be 215 million weblogs?! There are only six to seven billion people on the planet¹. And that's another problem: six billion to seven billion? What, are they not sure if they missed counting one of the continents or not? And oi vey, it's again with the ranges. Where does this actually work in real life? Yes, this week I will pay you between $500 and $5000. Only scientists get away with this. 6 billion to 7 billion is only an 11½% range difference, as compared to the 430% range difference in blog estimates; but it is still a ONE BILLION difference in people count.  Listen up students, we know that the world population is 6 or 7 billion, give or take a billion. Even so, the world population estimate is closer than the blog count estimate. We really don't know anything for sure, do we? Except this, there are an awful lot of bloggers out there. There are an awful lot of blogs to subscribe to. My little fingers could fall off typing in URLs so site visit counters can make somebody's ego swell. It's a lot of work this blogging business.

But that's just a raw estimate of how many total blogs there are on the internet. The number provides no info as to how many are abandoned, how many are taken down or hijacked, how many are duplicate sites? Or how many just stink on ice. Do Facebook notes and Tweets count as blogs? Does it count if you start a weblog and all you ever get around to doing is posting a profile and a comment? What happens if you migrate the same material to a mirror site – is it one or two blogs? Who counts these things and how do they do it? It's impossible to know and even if you could figure it out at any particular moment in the space-time continuum it would continue to change faster than the exchange rate for gold. The only sure thing is that there is no sure thing. And that's for certain. Probably.

1 in 4 of the under-25 crowd maintains an updated weblog with pretty regular daily updates. So they claim. I've seen the way my teenagers write. Question: Does a horribly grammar mangled Facebook status update count as a blog? David is up, David is going to school, David is home now, David is eating dinner, David is going to church for youth group, David is going to bed now. David is wasting bandwidth. The world needs less blogs, not more.

I have to ask myself, why am I even writing a blog? I mean, what the heck is wrong with me? Who in the world needs to see one from this old geezer? Especially one that will be admittedly intermittent in regularity. You don't care when I get up, go to work or have a date with my wife (except my wife – and the lucky teenage daughter chosen to babysit her younger sibs). And I won't vent every annoyance either. The web needs more dynamic or informational sites not another over-the-hill white male angst catharsis. But I give this promise – I will never do a vlog. I'm not young and beautiful enough for that.

Digital storage is cheap so I'm jumping in. But my toes are going in the water cautiously. I'm not sure what I want to share. I have a habit of venting and then deleting the rant. It embarrasses me after I calm down. I've learned that I should sit on emotional messages overnight before hitting the send button. And do I really want to sit there looking at the screen figuring out why my idea isn't translating to the written word, wondering if I'm making any sense, and knowing that some idiot is going to take offense at anything I say and post insulting comments about my heritage below my post? Not really; and yet I'm doing it anyway.

This little cyber-place is for me. It's another place to put my stuff. No dedicated subject, no excessive politicking and no redundant campaigning. If you happen on this blog – welcome! If not, I'm not counting visitors and I won't be checking the views every morning. If I see that this month I got 7 views but one of them changed their mind half way in it isn't going to bother me. There are 214,999,999 other blogs to checkout as well. Some of them are even worth visiting.

1. Data provided by the United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division, November 2008.