Anne Helmond of the Blog Herald has wrote an interesting article that questions whether or not, the number of blogs within the blogosphere still matters and if anyone out there is still bothering to count.

Anne asked a number of questions within her article such as:

Is the medium mature now? Is that why nobody seems to be counting blogs anymore? Do we no longer feel the need to count blogs because we have established their importance?

I think the reason why no one is counting blogs anymore is the simple reason that no one can come up with an accurate number. Using numbers that are published by Technorati should not be a single handed way of measuring the blogosphere. There are more blogs on the net than one could imagine, but there doesn’t appear to be a way to accurately measure the difference between a blogger, scraper or splogger. This problem of accurate metrics appears not only in the blogosphere, but it’s a severe problem within podcasting, advertising, and just about anything else dealing with the internet. Therefor, I think the problem is that no one cares how many blogs there are. No one cares how many of this or how many of that there are. How can they, when the numbers have no way of being proved accurate.

The comments that have appeared on this blog herald article are a good indication that people understand that this is a metrics problem, a problem that inherently has no single solution. There are so many variables to consider when trying to accurately determine the number of blogs on the net, that it’s mind boggling. Metrics is a science that we have yet to figure out. Until the problem of metrics is solved, I don’t see how anyone could take any numbers that are published without a block of salt.