Stats: Worldwide blog count & daily web video views

On Monday I had the opportunity to talk to two groups about how understanding web 2.0 can help their organizations. The first group I spoke to were the good people at Katcher, Vaughn, and Bailey, a PR firm in Nashville (thanks for the invitation Steve). The second group was the marketing department and some editorial staff at Randall House, a publishing company here in town.

In both cases I gave an overview of the six categories of web 2.0...the "massive Volkswagon" acronym MASSVW. We also discussed some additional terms like RSS, wiki, AJAX, and tags. One of the things that seemed to get everyone's attention were some stats about blogs and online video. You may find them interesting too if you haven't seen any recently. Here's the breakdown on both with the data I had:

Worldwide Blogs Count (source Technorati)

• Jan. 2004 - less than 2 million
• Jan. 2005 - 6 million
• Jan. 2006 - 24 million
• July 2006 - 50 million
• Jan. 2007 - 60+ million

Online Video - Average number of views per day (source ComScore)

• Oct. 2005 - less than 25 million
• Jan. 2006 - 125 million
• July 2006 - 700 million

I haven't seen any more recent data than July 2006 but I wouldn't be surprised to see that Jan. 2007 online video views reached 1 billion per day.

So what does this mean for you? First, if you're not one of the 60 million bloggers you might want to consider starting one. Blog writers are blog readers and the number of people who will read your blog is higher now that it's ever been. Second, how are you using online video to help you? Are you creating opportunities for people to embed any video you put online? If you're not, you are missing a tremendous opportunity.

Do you know what bloggers are saying about you?

Last week I talked about attack blogs and some ways to survive them. One thing I thought of after writing the post is that there are some proactive measures that can be taken prior to a crisis situation to monitor the blogosphere for both good and bad things that might be said about your organization. Here are a couple of things you should do (and they won't cost you anything):

• Search for your organization's name in Technorati and Google's Blog search. You want to do blog specific searches rather than just a simple Google search. This will cut out all the miscellaneous references from non-blogs.

• Search for key leaders names in Technorati and Google's Blog search. Same reasons as above.
  

• Set up an RSS feed in Technorati for a search for all of the above. If you don't know what RSS is check out this post. If so, Technorati has a cool feature that lets you retain any search as an RSS feed. If you do this you won't have to keep doing the two bullet points above. You can bring the search results to you as often as you like.
  

Even if you're not concerned about any type of crisis situation pertaining to blog discussions about your organization, I suggest you monitor this anyway. It will be a great way to learn for yourself what some people are saying about you (if anything) whether good or bad. It will also provide an opportunity to reach out to some like minded individuals.

If you're doing this type of search for a business organization, you might find you've got some big fans of a product or service you provide. You should really try to tap into those people and build a relationship with them. They're obviously natural evangelists. If you represent a church, you may discover some people in your congregation with unique gifts or compelling insight that would be an asset to your ministry. The point is you never really know what you're going to find so keep an eye on it on a regular basis. All it will take is one good find to make it worth while.