You want to hear a strong voice saying what he’s seen? Get over to Michael Totten’s blog where he’s writing from the Israel under fire. Lots of photos, too.

Is it the whole story? Of course not. There is no whole story to be had. But it is just what we hope for from the Blogosphere: The real as seen by a person we’ve come to know.

Lively discussion afterwards. [Tags: israel lebanon michael_totten citizen_journalism blogs]

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Sept. 9-10 there will be a BarCamp-style unconference in Boston about podcasting, blogging, etc. It’s called PodCamp and it looks like fun. Wish I could go. [Tags: podcasting conferences podcamp boston]

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Technorati’s posted its quarterly State of the Blogosphere survey (Disclosure). There’s been a slight slowdown in the growth rate, but nevertheless there are two blogs created each second. There are 1.6M posts per day, about double last year’s volume. About 70% of the pings Technorati receives (i.e., alerts that a new post has been posted) come from known spam sources. MSM continues to dominate as the sites to which bloggers link.

Lots more in Dave Sifry’s analysis… [Tags: technorati blogosphere ]

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Pew Internet has a new report on a national survey of bloggers. It’s the usual great stuff from Pew.

Eight percent of internet users, or about 12 million American adults, keep a blog. Thirty-nine percent of internet users, or about 57 million American adults, read blogs – a significant increase since the fall of 2005.

37% say their favorite topic is their life and experiences. 55% blog under a pseudonym. 52% blog to express themselves creatively. Only 27% say they blog to influence how other people think. 87% allow comments. Only 18% say they have an RSS feed.

Bloggers are racially and genderly diverse.

34% consider their blog to be a form of journalism. 56% spend time fact checking. (Let’s assume that the 56% includes the 34%, or else much merriment shall ensue.)

Lots and lots in the survey…

[Tags: blogging blogosphere pew]

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Paul Gillin is writing a book called The New Influencers about blogging — the book seems to be about marketing in the blogofied world — and has posted a pretty painless 25-question survey. (Here’s a column by Paul on the virtue of welcoming your critics.) [Tags: paul_gillin blogs marketing]

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Robert Scoble has announced he’s leaving Microsoft. On the heels of the promotion of blogger Jonathan Schwartz to the position of CEO of Sun, the Blogosphere has lost its only two examples of corporations productively allowing non-CEO employees to blog.

Pundit Doc Searls commented, “Now we’re down to three CEO bloggers and like a gazillion teenagers writing how much they hate their English teacher.”

In a note pinned to its site, the Blogosphere said it was going to “shut up about itself” for a while until it had time to come up with some new examples. [Tags: scoble humor blogging blogosphere]

PS: The Boston Globe illustrated its AP story about Scoble with a photo of Shel Israel, Robert’s co-author. You can see just a bit of Robert’s ear and eye where he’s been carefully cropped out of the photo.

PPS: Best of luck, Robert.

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Denise weighs in on the NYT story on blogs being held against job applicants. (She points to the Slashdotting of the story.)

Jeez, do we need a norm of understanding, which isn’t possible without a norm of forgiveness. And we’ll have ’em. It’ll just take time. [Tags: denise_howell blogs media]

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Paul Gillin is preparing a survey of bloggers for a book he’s working on about social media. He’s looking for comments on a draft of the survey… [Tags: paul_gillin]

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BusinessWeek Online has a two-parter on business blogging that’s smart enough to cite Jeneane Sessum, among others. (Part 1 Part 2) [Tags: blogging jeneane_sessum]

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Dave Sifry of Technorati has posted part two of his April “State of the Blogosphere” report. [ [Disclosure: I am on Technorati’s board of advisors and Dave is a friend.]

Part One said (as per Dave’s summary):

Technorati now tracks over 37.3 million blogs

The blogosphere is doubling in size every 6 months

It is now over 60 times bigger than it was 3 years ago

On average, a new weblog is created every second of every day

Part Two dives into the internationality of blogging. Dave writes:

Something that may come as a surprise (at least to the English-speaking world) is that English isn’t the biggest language of the blogosphere. In fact, English isn’t even the primary language of one third of all posts that Technorati tracks anymore. Another interesting finding is that the Chinese blogosphere, which grew significantly in 2004 and 2005 (launches of MSN Spaces in Chinese, Bokee.com saw a peak of 25% of all posts in Chinese in November 2005) seems to be slowing down somewhat this year.

It also finds that 47% of posts have an author-generated tag or category associated with it — the blogosphere is a nation of metadata monkeys! (And Lor’ bless ’em, every one.)19.4 million bloggers (55%) are still posting 3 months after their blogs are created

Technorati tracks about 1.2 Million new blog posts each day, about 50,000 per hour

[Tags: blogosphere tagging david_sifry technorati]

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