Zits blog-a-thon

The popular daily cartoon strip "Zits" has been on a roll all this week with its portrayal of blogging, and brings a smile to the face of those of us who have been regulars in the blog world for a while now:



It may be hard for us seasoned vets to realize that there's still a lot of people out there who just don't "get" blogging (like my sister-in-law, for example; I can safely single her out because I know she'll never read this) but it's likely that plenty of befuddled parents may look at their kids after reading these strips in the newspaper and ask "Honey, what's a blog?" It won't be that way for very much longer. Blogging is fast becoming part of mainstream culture, no longer just the personal hobby* of a handful. As of this month, blog search engine Technorati was tracking over 38 million blog sites, with another 75,000 new ones being created every day. 50,000 new posts appear every hour, and the Blogosphere is doubling in size every six months. The search site monitors over 2.4 billion links. Those are some pretty incredible statistics, and may indicate that we're close to reaching what author Malcolm Gladwell calls a "tipping-point machine", an engine of cultural change that happens so fast, it can cause a good idea to suddently tilt from obscurity to ubiquity. As Gladwell puts it, "Ideas and behavior and messages and products sometimes behave just like outbreaks of infectious disease. They are social epidemics."

Zits is © 2006 by King Features Syndicate. Kudos to creators Jerry Scott and Jim Borgman.


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*Feel free to use the word "obsession" if it applies to you.