Saturday, April 29, 2006

CIA discovers the blogosphere: Big Brother is reading your diary

The CIA has discovered blogs, it seems. Watch what you write in your online diary.

The Company's newly created Open Source Center has "recently stepped up data collection and analysis based on bloggers worldwide and is developing new methods to gauge the reliability of the content," according to an ABC News story that quotes an earlier Washington Times story.

Apparently they are already using their data mining to track avian flu outbreaks. How scientific of them!

They claim to be getting a lot of inside information on Chinese military buildups from Chinese bloggers, too.

And don't worry about the cost to taxpayers of this scheme — they're packaging the information they mine and re-selling it to state and local police for big bucks.

Technorati CEO Dave Sifry just released his End of First Quarter report on blog activity.

In summary:
  • Technorati now tracks over 35.3 million blogs
  • The blogosphere is doubling in size every six months
  • It is now over 60 times bigger than it was three years ago
  • On average, a new weblog is created every second of every day
  • 19.4 million bloggers (55%) are still posting three months after their blogs are created
  • Technorati tracks about 1.2 Million new blog posts each day, about 50,000 per hour
Image: Gandalf catching Sam eavesdropping on his conversation with Frodo, artist Robert Chronister.

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