David Sifry posts on the state of the blogosphere. There are more than 57mn blogs, and amazingly, more than half of them are active: “About 55% of all blogs are active, which means that they have been updated at least once in the last 3 months.” The blogosphere has very slightly slowed in growth, doubling only (!) every 236 days or so.
You’d expect that, really. This doubling stuff has got as much to do with new blogs as new bloggers, I’m inclined to think. The number of bloggers may not grow nearly as much. But we diddle about with different hosts and platforms. Lose interest in one blog and start another. That’s purely based on anecdotal evidence: the 33% of my RSS subs that have changed address over the last 12 months. But those 33% are presumably pretty established (since I managed to find them, they must be) and so less volatile than the norm.
There are 1.3mn postings per day. So, only 1 in (meh..) 48 blogs get a daily update, averaged out. In reality, there’s probably a long tail: about 10% updated daily; 10% updated 2–3 times a week and the rest every now and then. I’d love to know the breakdown on that. How may of us only post once a week, a month? — quite a lot according to the stats. And what is the measure of that?
Update: Google Blogoscoped has the funniest take on this story.
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Internet traffic is bound to grow given the wave of technology around the world. Now that the mobile phone is ubiquitous worldwide, the next revolution will be to get blogs on these basic phones.
For example, my partner’s family members who live in Guatemala, have mobile phones, but don’t have internet connectivity.
Blogs will continue to grow. What is neat is that this growth is not always concomitant with business. Most of it is based on interest, family and friends.
The only issue will be that not all the traffic will be in English (or whatever we call it now days).
I think what’s great about all these things is that they sidestep the business/consumer divide. Nearly all of these technologies are *both*. They are about individuals, not ‘you as business person’ or ‘you as consumer’.
Will the blog boom expand onto mobiles? Quite possibly — I am sure that MySpace, bebo et al are mad for it as a way of monetising their market.
Hey Ian, some days I just have to feel you’re ahead of the game. Getting my head out of the code and posting after 6 days of darkness, I find 10 minutes later, you spoke on the very subject! Maybe you should be my co-author :)
Your graphs look prettier too!
If Technorati is to believed then your habit of posting twice a day puts you in the super high influencer league! which I would concur.
“super high influencer”? tell that to my wife…