Martialling Internet numbers, artfully

Okay, this will not come as a surprise to anyone under 20, maybe not even under 30, but for the rest of us, I think it takes a personal awakening to realize just how big the Internet is, and how it really does connect people for the first time, in a way nothing else has.

A martial arts awakening

My awakening came today, when I learned that a boy can flip his way around the world and get thousands to watch, almost effortlessly (well, learning to flip is an effort and so is travelling, sometimes). I've written about him before. We're related.

This week I have been reading Naked Conversations by Shel Israel and Robert Scoble, a well-written, interesting look at how blogging is changing the business world. I will review it here once I finish it, but so far one of the things that has made an impact is the numbers they use. We're not just talking about the number of bloggers in the world, somewhere so far into the millions that the last number I saw (48 million?) three months or so ago must be well out of date. Would anyone like to contribute their educated guess at the current blogging population?

Numbers this size are hard to absorb. When Scoble and Israel talk about numbers, though, gently pushing home their point about Internet interconnectivity, the digits start to register. Three high school kids who created a little software so they could chat with 40 friends - within two months there were 65,000 downloads and 26 months later they had racked up 25 million downloads (read the book to find out how much money they made selling it to AOL). A little later Skype comes along and collects 25 million users in 19 months for its online phone service. Then Firefox, a new browser, reaches 25 million downloads in 99 days.

But these are the big guys, I think, even if they started little. The rest of us still think in smaller terms, I console myself, as I try to work out the potential readership for an online news stream called GenevaLunch that goes live soon. Newspapers and magazines count readers in thousands and hundreds of thousands - over the million mark in big cities like New York, for a major newspaper. TV networks in the U.S. do better.

When the New York Times can't compete

Traditional media, including the big guys, start to look really small - something I've been reading about for years in Ad Age and Publishers Weekly, two industry bibles, but I had managed to ignore the news. Scoble and Israel were beginning to convince me, I realized earlier today.

And then Liam checked his reports, for the first time, from Google video: 66,000 views. And more on YouTube.

"Cool."

I finally got the message.