One of my theories is that Blogs replaced Life Cams (1:many broadcast cams like JennyCam) as an optimal performance method of sharing one’s day to day existance on the internet. As part of looking into this, I did a lexus/nexus study of the major media impressions for the phrases “Webcam” and “Blog”. The trends are pretty interesting. Note that webcams move into media decline in 2002 as blogs spike.

Also note that 2004 reports on blogging take a major jump. As the data shows a more than 2x jump on the back half of the year, I think it’s pretty safe to attribute this to election coverage. In particular, political blogs got a lot of coverage as a part of the Rather/CBS erronious Bush report. I expect that the number of media impressions in 2005 will be below these numbers.

Here’s a different view of the same data:

If you’re interested in toying with the data, here’s it in Excel format. Just let me know how you use it.