Sifry's Alerts

Great post. I find the 75,000 new blogs a day figure to be incredible!

Spam has indeed become a problem when searching technorati. Are there any plans to have a way for users to report splogs? Perhaps Technorati could provide either a basic contact form to report splogs, or something similar to craigslist.

Do you know what else is annoying? People who ambulance-chase current stories on the web, in order to promote their blogs in the comments section.

Reptilian Watch - http://www.bedoper.com/reptilian
is especially bad about doing that sort of thing.

These images are fantastic for helping clients understand the importance of the blog world... Thanks!

great post david, do you have any numbers on the total number of corporate blogs, you estimated this a few years ago. And I wondered if you had an update?

John Cass

The almost 10% increase in active blogs after 3 months is probably the most significant stat to me. Suggests that not only is traffic to blogs as a whole increasing, but that bloggers are getting a better grasp on how to attract and RETAIN that traffic.

Thanks for a great update, David.

I'm wondering how the composition and the readership of the Technorati 100 has changed in the last few quarters. It'd be interesting to see those growth stats relative to that of the overall blog universe.

Second, it'd be interesting to understand how the categories are diversifying as the absolute number of blogs grow, i.e., which categories are the new blogs in the last quarter are focusing on vs. the new blogs in the previous quarter and/or last year.

Also numbers on how the use of Technorati tags might provide a window into the mainstreaming (or not) of tagging in general.

Thanks again.

Thank you. Do you have any data on interesting or atypical blog implementations? For example, feedback loops in blogs (other than comments), social network blogoshpere, visualizations, or outcomes-based blogging (trying to make something collaboratively in a blog)?

Carol Minton Morris

thanks for the info david. Out of curiosity, does the number above include things like myspace, livejournal, and other more closed community blogs?

How easy was it to generate this data? Is this data itself exposed through an RSS feed? It would be interesting to see a chart of the emergence of WebPress (or rather, decline of MovableType with each new version).

This is unblievable. The pace will slow down, as the law of large numbers will inevitably rear its head. Nonetheless, I am amazed, and Mr. Sifry is looking like a very, very smart man! Thank you for bringing us Technorati.

What you can say about the 37 million chinese blogs claim by Baidu ?

I wonder how many new blogs are real blogs, and how many are just spam. Also with the blog lives starting to live longer, I wonder at the quality to quantity ratio.

My grandmother made her own blog the other day, which is fascinating because she's been dead for twelve years. In fact, I do drugs.

Does anyone track the consumption side of the supply demand equation ? How are blogs spreading into mainstream users daily internet habits ? Could be millions of blogs that are never visited at all.

Wow... How does Blogger and similar services keep their services free with such growth?!

Originally we thought of ourselves as a Sydney based technology company... As of this momment-my company is holding a Web 2 /social software education forum in the Philippines...here we are in Quezon City -thousands of kilometers from what we once thought of as our market. We are webcasting live our education in our blog...this technology enables in fashions many fail to yet realise.

It is a small world, and getting smaller!

Kevin Leversee
pandorasquared.com

I would be more interested in seeing how many of these blogs had been posted on in the last month or two. How many blogs out there does nothing for me seeing that many people blog for a couple of months and then quit.

While the world may be getting smaller, the battle for attention is becoming more and more challenging. One of the cool things about Technorati is that it encourages us all to be more and more specific about our subject area. As blog readers we are more interested in specialties than in broadsheet type news. We want the personal view, not the world view. But I am way behind ... I have 74,975 new blogs to read today!

This is fascinating stuff, but of course it begs the question: how much of this new blog-material is any good? There's spam, and there's splogs, but how much is haircut blogs, how much is "wow, a blog, tech is fab, what do I say now?" how much is "my webguy said I needed a blog and I'm a coach, dammit, so I shall blog...'today I was reminded of an important customer service point..." etc?

Is there an authoritative blog critic out there? I'm familiar with plenty of "submit your blog" sites, but they seem entirely too enamoured of bouncing blue kittens, soundtracks, and funky floating cursortrails, rather than analyzing the content.

David this is really amazing and I have blogged about it today. I wonder how many women blog compared to men?

David this is really amazing and I have blogged about it today. I wonder how many women blog compared to men?

David this is really amazing and I have blogged about it today. I wonder how many women blog compared to men?

This is indeed a very important article for anyone who wants to take blogging seriously. I have seen many people who think that blogging is merely writing online diary. Thanks to Technorati we can see that blogging is growing at a huge rate.

It would also be good if there was a way to track the readership of the blogosphere, how many people are reading blogs, not just making and doing them.

Indeed, impressive numbers, but what continues to disappoint me is that the number of business executives who are blogging is so small. Recently I was working on an initiative for a group blog for an organization of business leaders. From emails sent out to over a thousand people, we found that only 3 had active blogs.

Looking at data on Bloglines users, we've concluded that

- Feeds that really matter (FTRMs) are a small fraction of Blogosphere
- FTRMs double in a year rather than six months
- Most users follow a modest number of feeds

For details, see http://ebiquity.umbc.edu/blogger/2006/04/18/preferential-attachment-in-feeds/

Tim

Amazing! Even that sounds like an understatement...75000 blogs a day? Awesome!

"The Blogosphere doubles ever 6 months"

Awesome. This means that by 2009 there will be 8.8B blogs! :)

"Feeds that really matter (FTRMs) are a small fraction of Blogosphere"

I've been calling this the attentive blogosphere.

This isn't what this means.

This means that for PEOPLE THAT USE RSS AGGREGATORS (which is in turn a small percentage of Internet users) use a small portion of the blogosphere.

I think this is an important distinction because RSS aggregator users aren't internet-typical just yet.

Most people find blogs via search engines or read them directly in browsers (gasp!).

Of course any speculation on what percentage of users are using blogs only within browsers is totally up for grabs.

Kevin

No origami?

Good points about the feed readers. Fewer than ten percent of my readers use feeds. Naturally, the percentage is higher for tech blogs, as the readers are more technical. Hit counters do contribute information, once you strip out bot hits, although they vary in the quality and type of info they provide.

Ugh... it's kind of discouraging to see the figures, actually. How do you build readership when your just another small fry amonst millions of writers looking for the same exposure?

Chris Edwards has noticed [1] that some of the spikes are attributed to some events in this report, and to *different* events in your February 06 report [2]. For example, the spike labeled now "iPod Video" was labeled "Iraq Constitution" in February. You can see the difference better in this graphic:

http://blog.basturea.com/extra/technorati-graphics-4.gif

Is there a mistake in labeling the spikes?

Thank you for the report!

[1] http://blog.hackingcough.com/2006/04/multipurpose_sp.htm
[2] http://www.sifry.com/alerts/archives/000419.html

These are some big numbers, but it'd be interesting to see them broken down a bit more. Posting volume is definitely the key to tracking the growth of the blogosphere. As we all know there are far too many "tire kickers" (as David puts it) out there who create a blog and abandon it. Or -- and I'm guilty of doing this in my early days -- there are bloggers who create a blog on, say, Blogspot but can't decide which URL to register so they register three or four just to make sure noone else grabs them before they do. Though that's probably not as rampant as I make it out to be.

As far as breaking down the numbers, I'd be interested to see how many corporate blogs are out there, as well as professional blogs (like this one), and then personal blogs that entertain or provide knowledge (i.e. capable of attracting loyal readers who have no personal ties to the blogger), followed by blogs that are merely personal journals (i.e. not intended for other readers or read only by a few close friends). This would be followed finally by dead blogs and splogs.

Even if they were only rough percentages of those categories, it would help. Anyone have any best guesses?

Dave -- you keyed into the idea of the conversational ability of blogs originally and you were one of the first to do so.

Is there any way to track the loop-backs other than links in? Mutual looping for more than a one-way conversation? Measuring spiking chatter is topical but measuring the mutual conversation of influentials would be interesting.

Thanks for all you do and have done.

Æåíþñü ÷òî íå ñäåëàåøü ....

No doubt about the impact of bloggers...and we're proud to have added an 'editor's blog' to our alternative news site!

Our readership is extraordinary....both in numbers and in intelligence - as we can tell from the comments and the email we get every day.

Jesse's Blog has been linked around the globe on a regular basis. Come on down and click on "editor's blog" so you can read our views for yourself:

TvNewsLIES.org

Use www.blogghost.net for free blog hosting!

Good statistics. But what do we actually know about this last 16 million-odd blogs that have come online? What do they write about? What kind of people are they?

Any idea what that huge dip in blogging was between the London bombings and Katrina? Did the most bloggers just take that time off?

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