Incredible Blogger statistic

I find it amazing that in the space of 10 minutes, 1259 blogs were updated on Blogger.

That's the stat from 5:47 am PDT to 5:56 am.

It might be different now, so I've included the link.

What does this mean? It means that there's a whole lot of folks blogging out there. It doesn't mean that there's a proportional increase in useful information, though. There's no statistic on the signal to noise ratio in blogs. That's because one person's signal is another person's noise.

For example, there are a lot of personal diary-type weblogs out there. Are those "noise?" Some, perhaps. But what about a personal blog that's about someone's effort to quit smoking, or a fight with cancer? Every good story on the web is worth filtering through some noise, in my opinion.

Another Blogger Hack

Ok, today what I did was add a "blogroll" to the sidebar. This is a listing of blogs to which I subscribe via Bloglines.

Bloglines is a free, web-based aggregator, which will keep track of all your frequently-read blogs in one handy site. It's better than a bookmark because Bloglines will check for new content automatically. All you have to do is show up and look at your list. Any blogs with new content will have the name in bold, with the number of new posts listed as well.

Also, Bloglines gives you the opportunity to share your list (but you don't have to, and you can even pick which blog links to share and which to keep private.)

There are two ways to share: by adding the list on the sidebar, if you have your own blog, or by giving folks a link, like this: My blog list.

Neat, eh?

Anyway, I once again hacked the template so that the blogroll showed up where I wanted it to. I'm not sure how to get those little green bullets, though. The content is actually coming from Bloglines; it's dynamic, and will change if I add or delete any blogs from my list.

So for that reason, I don't think I can get those bullets, since all Blogger sees is a line in the code that tells it to go to a certain URL on the Bloglines site. Bloglines walked me through creating that shared list -- piece of cake. It was almost all copy and paste.

And one note: the wonderful template I'm using for this blog was created by Dan Cederholm. His blog is Simple bits (see list).

Bloglines will walk you through the whole process of finding blogs and adding them to your own list. Try it!