You Know My Name (Look Up The Number)

There's a new blog directory on the scene called Blogarama.

It seems to be an attempt to create a user-driven directory (202 blogs currently listed and counting). But there are already sites like diarist.net and The Pepys Project (speaking of which, the original is now on-line), not to mention the dmoz project's weblog category, Eatonweb Portal, and many, many others. And then there are the specialized blogger directories, like NYC Bloggers or photoblogs.org.

The basic problem with manually-driven weblog directories is that unless you're talking about a specific, targeted directory (like NYC Bloggers) where there is a clearly defined member set and audience, the blogosphere is simply too big for any single directory to do it justice (an analogue would be the way that Yahoo! eventually had to give up on cataloging the web by hand).

Moreover, many bloggers don't actually use blog directories to find sites that they might be interested in. Because bloggers are, by definition, narcissistic, they are much more likely to find sites by poring over their referrer logs to find out who's been linking to them. Automated, robot-based sites are also popular (Blogdex, Daypop, Popdex, Organica, technorati, Weblogs.com, blogmints, blo.gs and so on and so forth) are also popular because they give a sense of the ever-expanding blogverse as a web of connections.

I suspect that in the long run, all attempts to fully map or catalog the blogverse are doomed to failure because the network of blogs is growing faster than you can link to them all. Blogger alone has more than one million register users (how many are still actively blogging is a matter of debate, though).

(OK, I'll admit that the real reason why I think Blogarama is doomed is because they open their links inside a frame with their toolbar across the top. Tacky, isn't it?)