Enter World: exploring mediated cultures

Saturday, October 25, 2008

Everywhere I look in my feeds and alerts there are short pieces about the increase in lawsuits against bloggers popping up. But what does 4 lawsuits in 1997 versus 89 in 2007 really mean?

The madness seems to arise from division: 89 is 22.25 times 4. That sounds pretty impressive.

But what if we use something a little more meaningful like the percentage of the blogs involved in lawsuits to compare this much-cited statistic?

Blogging began in the 1990s. As far back as 1993 there was a forest protection blog, in 1994 there was a student writing a diary online, but it wasn’t until 1999 that blogs took off. And it wasn’t until 2001 that they became mainstream. Then in 2004 they flew into the spotlight. The number of people blogging increased with the popularity of blogging. The question becomes: How many bloggers were there in 1997?

We’ll start in 2007 and work backward. In 2007, there were over 70 million blogs. It is important to note that this is only how many blogs Technorati was tracking at that time, the actual number of blogs was most likely higher.  With 89 lawsuits spread out between 70,000,000 blogs that would be .0001% of blogs in 2007 that were called into courts. 

The State of Technorati only goes back as far as 2004 when the 3 millionth blog was tracked and 12,000 new blogs were being created every day.

It’s more difficult to find the number of blogs from 1997. A BloggerCon post estimates no more than 4 to 5 blogs were up in 1997. That would mean 100% of blogs in 1997 were called into court!?

The BBC says in 1998 there were 23 blogs. Just for fun, let’s use this number—because it’s hard to believe that ALL the blogs in 1997 were sued. If there were 23 blogs with 4 having lawsuits brought against them, that would mean that 17% of blogs were involved.

Let’s recap:
1997/1998: 17 or 100 percent of blogs are involved in a lawsuit
2007: .0001 percent of blogs are involved in a lawsuit

Does this sound like an increase warranting all of the hype? It is still a good thing to know the laws, and taking the free online media law class won’t hurt—but I’m beginning to think these “posts” I’ve seen are actually press releases pushing the sale of buying insurance.