The state of blogs

There's a great write-up on The Guardian about the state of the blogosphere (I think we might be allowed to use that term unironically now). From the piece:

The furore over social media and its impact on democracy has obscured the fact that the blogosphere not only continues to exist, but also to fulfil many of the functions of a functioning public sphere. And it’s massive. One source, for example, estimates that more than 409 million people view more than 20bn blog pages each month and that users post 70m new posts and 77m new comments each month. Another source claims that of the 1.7 bn websites in the world, about 500m are blogs. And Wordpress.com alone hosts blogs in 120 languages, 71% of them in English.

It's a small and gentle reminder that behind the bluster of Twitter et al is something that still works, even though it might not be as visible, loud and marketable.