One question I ask every now and then on this blog is, "Who are all you people?"

Through a combination of reporting improvements and overall growth, my subscriber count now stands at 1679...   and, I probably know about 100 people that I think subscribe...  Other than that, the other 1500 or so of you are anyone's guess.

I find myself asking this question even more with Twitter and MyBlogLog.  Little heads pop up on my blog and people twitterfriend me and I have no clue who they are, how they got here, or why they read.

So, as I've done in the past, if you are a new reader and you're pretty sure I don't know you, feel free to introduce yourself to me and everyone else in the comments. 

The garbage you've seen posted here (...to be more specific, the unreadable garbage... erm... I mean.. the garbage in computer gobbledygook....   well...  you know what I mean...) is courtesy of Typepad Mobile, which seems to be on the fritz.

In the last week, I went from about 950 readers to 1100.  Feedburner glitch or real human subscribers?   We'll see if it lasts.

In the meantime, I'm proud to say that my Fordham undergrad class got marching orders last night to start up their blogger blogs.   Last week, they e-mailed some bloggers to get tips and they're building that last as they get responses here.   One student jumped all over it and had his blog up about 40 minutes after class ended.  Should be a lot of fun as, in a couple of weeks, we'll be moving from a discussion on tools to a talk about how specific industries are being affected by technology.  They'll be blogging their responses and thoughts on the subject.  Should be fun.

Plus, I'm going to open up those pages on how industries are being affected to the public...  so you'll have a chance to have some input into the content of my class.

It's snowing here, by the way.  I'm sort of unimpressed. 

Thanks Nicole...

If you still think that everyone who blogs is a member of the same community, check out Buzzmetrics Top 10 Most Linked To Blog Posts of 2006.

The top post has 800 or so links in, and it is a petition in the LiveJournal community not to change the interface.

800...and then they really drop off from there.

So basically, in a community of 60+ million blogs, according to Technorati, no more than 0.00126% of people linked to the same post at once.

Of course, that doesn't count del.icio.us tags, where sometimes posts get a thousand links or two, but even that's just a drop in the bucket.

Even the most popular blogs overall don't have significant mind or market share when you think about the overall blogging audience, let alone the readership.  Engadget and Boing Boing have about 20,000 blogs linking in... or about 0.033% of all blogs.

So, before you think that pitching to the most popular blogs overall is going to make or break your product, get a little perspective.  What is the right audience for what you're trying to do?  Maybe you're better off pitching to a recipe blog that has 200 really active readers versus a tech blog with a hundred thousand readers who mostly just browse and comment to be seen.

So Time picked you and me... the users, as its Person of the Year, holding out YouTube as its shining example of a community driven media revolution.

I have two reactions to this.

First, I don't need old media telling me I'm special.   Like Jarvis wrote, it has always been us.  Only now, it seems to be fashionable and profitable to say so.  Old media giving us a pat on the back reminds me of that line in Pink Floyd's Animals:

"You have to be trusted by the people that you lie to
So that when they turn their backs on you
You'll get the chance to put the knife in."

So, to Time, I give a big fat thanks but no thanks... the same reaction I have to blogging "A-lists".  We're just people, living out our lives and talking.  That's not special, that's just real.  Unfortunately, it took the web a long time to get this close to reflecting real life.

That being said, my bigger issue is that it really doesn't reflect real life for most people.  Most people aren't blogging or posting on YouTube.

And, in the year where it became obvious that we weren't going to "win" in Iraq, I have to admit, that I feel a little sickened that we're being so self-congratulatory about taking over the web.  We're nearling 3,000 US military deaths in Iraq, now more than the number of civilians killed in 9/11... and we're talking about...  YouTube?  Are you serious?  PS... Newt Gingrich pointed out something interesting today...  60% of young Iraqi males are out of work.  He suggested fixing things over there by instituting an FDR-sized civil works program.  Instead of paying soldiers to shoot people who have nothing better to do than to shoot at us, how about paying citizens to fix their own country and go to work.

Look, I'm impressed and awed by user generated media as much as the next guy.  I mean, hey, I work for an avatar company. 

But, let's reserve this award for the year that bloggers and YouTubers end the War in Iraq, Save Darfur, rebuild New Orleans, address global warming (I'm going to bike into the city today, December 17th and it's going to be 62 degrees in NYC), push voter turnout over 80%, fix our education system, ban Paris Hilton from all media, start getting states to fall like dominos on gay marriage, or all of the above.  Right now, I think we're still doing a little too much talking to ourselves to deserve the proverbial reach around.  We still have a lot of work to do.

Hopefully, enough of you stick around so that this sticks, but for now, my Feedburner RSS feed count is showing four digits for the first time.  Yup...  1,012 readers. 

Now each of you just need to recommend this blog to 150 other people and we'll catch TechCrunch in no time.  :)

Actually, the thing that always gets me is that I have no idea who most of you are.  So, like I've done once before...   Here's your opportunity to introduce yourself, particularly if you've been lurking this whole time.

Please feel free to announce your presence in the comments...  Tell us who you are, how you got here, what you do... feel free to link to your own company, blog, flickr photos, last.fm page, LinkedIn, whatever...     I'm always happy to meet more readers.

And thanks for reading!   

If blogging really is a cocktail party, then I should really be listening and contributing to other people's conversations just as much as I'm expecting people to listen to mine.   I mean, who would really want to engage in a conversation with someone who just talks about their own stuff all the time?   

So, starting today, I'm going to make a valient attempt to comment as much as I post (not including my daily link posts).   

You can track how well I'm doing with my new coComment widget on the sidebar.  I took the Incircles chat thing off, b/c I didn't have a way to see if anyone was using it and the couple of times I popped in there, no one was.  I guess I should finally give up on the idea of embedded chat.  I've used coComment before, but never the widget...  this is take two.

There's even an RSS feed for it.  If and when I figure out how to get that feed spliced into my Feedburner feed, I'll do that.

So, from now on, I'll be trying to write as much on other people's blogs as much as I write here.