Thoughts on The Tipping Point

The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell is a book that makes you think. Just as Blink looked at how we form our first impressions, this earlier book by Gladwell is equally provocative.

The subtitle “How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference” says it all. He shows how a few trendy kids buying vintage Hush Puppies propelled a dying shoe company into a national sensation. He shows how removing the graffiti from the subway cars in New York City completely turned around a trend in crime. He shows how an incidence of suicide in Micronesia seems to spawn copycats. He shows how the secret to breast cancer awareness in San Diego was using beauty shops as the information source. And on and on and on.

In each case, there was one idea or event that made a definite difference in an outcome. The person who chose this book has challenged each of us in our book club to come up with examples of tipping points.

A personal tipping point was my path from a once-a-week user of my home computer to an almost obsessive relationship with that machine. It all started around the time I started Blogging. Until then I had entirely enough keyboard exposure at my job, which was computer oriented. The last thing in the world I wanted to do at home was sit down and do anything at that machine. I often missed events and had to be called because I simply wasn’t a good e-mail correspondent. But in December 2004, my tipping point occurred when Looking2live was launched.

Which led me to wonder what the tipping point for Blogging was. In 2003, virtually no one had ever heard of a Blog or much less read one. Even at the point at which I started, the vast majority of Bloggers were under 35. But over the past 4 years I have seen that totally change.

I was surprised to find so few current statistics out there about the history of Blogging and the current number of Bloggers. The most comprehensive report I could find was put out by David Sifry of Technorati in April 2007. At that point the number of Blogs was doubling about every 6 months with 120,000 new Blogs each day. By the end of 2007, Technorati was tracking some 112 million Blogs. Wikipedia provides a fairly comprehensive history of Blogging.

I keep wondering what it was that launched so many new people down the Blogging path between 2003 and today (most of the 112+ million)? Was it the reports from Bloggers at the national political conventions? Or perhaps the “Rathergate” scandal whereby Bloggers showed documents conflicting with accepted accounts of President Bush’s military service record and reported by Dan Rather on CBS News to be forgeries? Was it a friend passing you a business card with her Blog name on the back?

I’m convinced that something happened around 2006 that caused those big spikes in David Sifry’s graph of new Bloggers.

And you – how and when did you come to Blogging? If you are simply reading without having your own Blog, what might be the tipping point that causes you to start one?

I love a book that is so revealing about human nature, a book that keeps you thinking after you read the last page!