Zillions of photos, videos, blogs and more (some of them have to be good).
The banner at the top of social media tracking site and search engine, Technorati, may have reached the abstract numbers (in the last 18 months it has gone from under 20 million blogs to it's current 'zillions') but it makes a good point, if through a slightly backhanded compliment.
Part of the beauty of the blogging phenomenon, if it can still be called that, is its simplicity and accessibility. Free blogging platforms like blogger and wordpress, not to mention other social media sites like Myspace, have opened up the blogosphere to the masses. The latest stage in the democratisation of web publishing no longer needs you to do any coding or design skills to publish your content on the web. All you need is an email address. Ready-to-use templates and WYSIWYG editors have opened up the web and the masses are blogging. Zillions of them apparently.
Except that's the problem. Despite Technorati's assurances that 'some of them have to be good' a huge amount of them aren't. Not unless you have a burning desire to read about what someone had for dinner or the finer details of someone's obsession with a particular niche hobby or band. Badly written content and poorly edited images aside, that's not to say that these blogs aren't valid. But they do tend to mar the perception of blogging when it comes to trying to sell it in as a valuable part of a web strategy.
Done well, a blog can add a huge amount of value to your site and can be a useful tool in any digital armoury. The problem comes in the lack of understanding of not only what a blog can do, but in understanding and communicating how to achieve this.
Perhaps the one thing that discourages people from using blogs is the idea that they won't be able to sustain the level of content needed for regular posts. There are countless sites out there that boast News sections where the most recent news story is weeks, if not months, old. There is a perception that blog content has to be newsworthy, and that if they can't generate enough content to properly populate a News section then there is little point in them creating a blog. This is not true. Blog content does not necessarily have to be newsworthy. It does however have to be interesting.
This is where I like the idea of what I call a downtime diary. News sections, no matter what kind of business they are about, tend to report on the big things. But in order to get to each of those big things there is always something going on in the background that doesn't get reported on. These are the insights into the day-to-day running of a business or a project that can be turned into blog posts that will engage the reader.