• by August 9, 2005

BIG MEDIA THINKS SMALL -- The World Wide Web began by ripping off other media - magazines, newspapers and TV - to develop both content and online publishing formats. Now that the Internet is hot, mainstream media are borrowing from the Web. Nary a day goes by that some mainstream media outfit - usually a television network - doesn't announce plans for some new-fangled Web extension. Lately, it's been podcasts. Now it's blogs.

When podcasting became the online app du jour earlier this year, big radio broadcasters like Clear Channel Radio and Infinity Broadcasting unveiled new podcast formats for their stations. Recently, Fox launched "Foxcast," a new podcasting service offering TV viewers the opportunity to download audio recaps of shows like "The Simpsons" and "The O.C." And to ensure that Fox's new media effort was au current, the network said it would also make the podcasts available as automatic updates via RSS feeds.

Of course, Fox parent News Corp. has seen the Internet light - again. Last month, News Corp. paid $580 million to acquire Intermix Media Inc., and simultaneously exercised an option to acquire a 47 percent stake in online community MySpace.com. Of course, this is not the first time Rupert Murdoch has whiffed online fumes. In fact, News Corp. was the first major traditional media company to make a significant investment online, acquiring Delphi Internet Services in the early 1990s before people were even surfing the Web. "What's Delphi," you say? Exactly. Before News Corp. got its hands on it, Delphi was one of the dominant early online services, rivaling AOL, CompuServe and Prodigy.

Traditional media companies are also getting into the blog act. On Monday, Court TV unveiled "Bloom Blog," a weekly online blog written by Court TV News Anchor Lisa Bloom.

The move into blogging is especially ironic, because blogs - or Web logs - by definition are the antithesis of big media. They're intended to be micro media, though some of them clearly generate big media numbers.

According to estimates released this week by comScore Networks, nearly 50 million Americans - or 30 percent of the U.S. Internet population - visited a blog during the first quarter of 2005. That's an increase of 45 percent over the first quarter of 2004. In fact, blogs can generate audiences that rival some TV outlets, especially the kind of niche cable networks that have a difficult time registering Nielsen ratings.

The most visited blog during the first quarter was drudgereport.com, which generated 44.3 million visits during the quarter. The action trails off from there. Fark.com ranks second with 10.1 million visits, followed by Gawker.com's 4.1 million visits.

By the time you make your way down to the 20th ranked blog - sportsbybrooks.com - things really taper off. The sports blog attracted only 711,000 visits - only 491,000 of them from unique visitors - during the quarter.

Interestingly, not one of the top 20 blogs is from a major media company, raising the question of whether big media blogs won't simply be adding to the noise reverberating from the blogosphere. And if new estimates from the blog sloggers at Technorati are to be believed, it's a noisy place indeed.

According to Technorati's new "State Of The Blogosphere" report, 80,000 new blogs are being created each day. That's a new blog every second.