Some very big numbers in David Sifry’s new report about the statistics thrown up by the blog tracking service Technorati:
- Technorati is now tracking over 50 Million Blogs.
- The Blogosphere is over 100 times bigger than it was just 3 years ago.
- Today, the blogosphere is doubling in size every 200 days, or about once every 6 and a half months.
- From January 2004 until July 2006, the number of blogs that Technorati tracks has continued to double every 5–7 months.
- About 175,000 new weblogs were created each day, which means that on average, there are more than 2 blogs created each second of each day.
- About 8% of new blogs get past Technorati’s filters, even if it is only for a few hours or days.
- About 70% of the pings Technorati receives are from known spam sources, but we drop them before we have to send out a spider to go and index the splog.
- Total posting volume of the blogosphere continues to rise, showing about 1.6 Million postings per day, or about 18.6 posts per second.
- This is about double the volume of about a year ago.
- The most prevalent times for English-language posting is between the hours of 10AM and 2PM Pacific time, with an additional spike at around 5PM Pacific time.
Sifry notes that English has become the number one language of the Blogosphere with 39% of the posts. However, 31% of posts are in Japanese, and large parts of the French and Korean blog community are not tracked by Technorati.
Currently, just 12% of blogs are in Chinese. However, by the end of 2006, it is predicted that China will have more broadband lines than the US, which ought to redress the balance somewhat. Currently, no Indian languages feature among the top 20, but again, I would guess that rapidly growing access to computers in India over this year will soon change that.
I find it interesting that the blogging phenomenon does not appear to be culturally specific. It has clearly taken hold in countries like Korea and Japan to a greater extent than many Western countries, but few areas with reasonable technology penetration are missing. It seems that the technological drivers for blog use (access to IT, easy tools, broadband, free hosting) are far more important than any of the cultural drivers that have been suggested to me — dissatisfaction with mainstream media, desire for self-expression, etc. Unless, of course, those things are universal.
Share this post:
Hi!
The only fear upon the Cinese growt is to be found in the limitation of the Human Rights. Mandarin is the most spoken language in the world, so it would be normal to think that the chinese blogs will become the most written one.
The fact is that if I had been chinese I wouldn’t have kept a blog, or I would have already ended up in jail.
I can give you the example of the italian people. Generalizing (bottleneck of the tought) I can say that the vaste majority of the italians are unhappy with their media. Think that italian press is considered PARTLY FREE (http://www.freedomhouse.org/template.cfm?page=16&year=2005&country=6760) and it is commonly known there. The fact is that the italians does not really understand how “manipulated” the media are. Another interesting point is the medium italian look at those things and says: “Ok… maybe it will change”. No screams against the limitations, no public protests to have a free press, not enough blogs. The exception is Beppe Grillo’s Blog (http://www.beppegrillo.it — also in english) that is one of the few voices.
Therefore I believe that the cultural component is very important indeed.
Cheers
Hi there Carlo. You might be right. I’m sure I’d be much less keen to blog if I knew the secret police were screening me for the least sign of dissidence.
Loving Beppe Grillo — I didn’t know you Italians were such rampant tortoise thieves ;)